Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Opens Near the Top of the Box Office

A nearly three-hour documentary about the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is drawing crowds normally reserved for studio releases. You Can See Everything, directed by the comedian Nathan Fielder and the filmmaker Lance Oppenheim and released by A24, took in about $15 million at North American theaters over its opening weekend, according to Sunday estimates reported by TechCrunch, and finished second only to Paramount’s Street Fighter.

Box office tracking by Box Office Mojo put the film’s weekend at about $15.6 million from 855 theaters, while Street Fighter earned about $30.8 million from 3,575. The documentary’s average per theater was therefore far higher than the leader’s. TechCrunch, citing the trade publication Deadline, reported that it ranks among the biggest opening weekends ever for a documentary and that it had about 2,000 sold-out screenings.

The film grew out of an unusual request. About a month before Holmes reported to prison in 2023 to begin an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors, she and her family approached A24 about filming her final weeks of freedom, according to TechCrunch’s review. Fielder, known for the television series Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, took on the project with Oppenheim, and the pair spent that month with extensive access to Holmes and her family. The film was first shown at a secretive screening at the Telluride Film Festival in early September.

Much of the movie turns on the question that has followed Holmes since Theranos collapsed: who she really is. In the film, Fielder presses her on whether the company was a kind of performance, a suggestion she rejects. Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu drama The Dropout, also appears. Because cameras were not allowed inside the prison, Fielder wrote out later conversations with Holmes from memory and rehearsed them, TechCrunch reported.

Critics have been enthusiastic. The film holds a 99 percent score on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, according to TechCrunch. TechCrunch’s reviewer called it a study of colliding personas and argued that nearly everyone on screen is performing to some degree, Fielder included.

Not everyone is comfortable with the premise. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in a company that promised blood tests it could not deliver, and a film built on her cooperation risks giving a convicted fraudster another stage to shape her image. The film’s defenders argue that it does the opposite, testing her account at every turn, and the TechCrunch review concluded that it is unlikely to persuade viewers she is innocent.

The weekend was less kind to other films about the technology industry. Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary Musk took in about $300,000, TechCrunch reported, and Aaron Sorkin’s drama The Social Reckoning had already fallen out of the top 10 a week after opening.