Nobody expected the biggest talking point of the October 16 to 18 weekend to be a nonfiction film that runs for three hours. Yet that is exactly what happened in North American cinemas. A24’s You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, earned an estimated $15 million from just 855 screens and finished second overall.
The documentary follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the months before she began her prison sentence. It was shot quietly over three years, revealed only at a surprise Telluride screening and then sold with a deliberately vague campaign. That secrecy turned curiosity into ticket sales. The average per theater came to about $17,500, far ahead of anything else in the top ten, and more than 2,000 shows reportedly sold out. Roughly seven in ten buyers were under 35, which is unusual for a long documentary, and its ratings on Letterboxd are among the highest the site has seen.
The weekend’s top spot still belonged to Paramount’s Street Fighter, which opened with around $31 million in North America plus about $20 million abroad. That is a solid result for a game adaptation, if a little short of what the studio hoped. Behind it, Other Mommy slipped to third, Whalefall had a soft fourth-place start, and a new Sense and Sensibility opened fifth.
The full chart and the records the documentary broke are covered in this weekend box office report.
Our directory verdict: if you can find a seat when the film expands next weekend, it is worth the time, mainly because seeing it with a full room is part of the experience. Fans of arcade action, meanwhile, have an easy Friday plan with Street Fighter.
