A24's Elizabeth Holmes documentary grows 25% in second weekend after posting its best opening in 13 years

"You Can See Everything," the A24 documentary in which Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spend three years circling Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, did something documentaries rarely do this weekend: it got bigger. The film's domestic gross jumped 25 percent in its second weekend of wide release, extending a run that trade outlets say has already given it the best documentary opening weekend in 13 years.

According to the weekend box office chart tracked by The Numbers, "You Can See Everything" earned $19.5 million from October 23 to 25, finishing second behind the horror film "Clayface" and pushing its domestic total to $45,145,476. That is a rare climb: the film took in $15.6 million on its October 16 opening weekend, when it played in 855 theaters and also ranked second, behind the video-game adaptation "Street Fighter." For its second weekend, A24 expanded the release to 2,655 theaters, more than tripling its footprint and reversing the usual pattern in which a film's gross falls after its first week.

• Opening weekend (Oct. 16-18): $15.6 million, 855 theaters, No. 2 behind "Street Fighter"
• Second weekend (Oct. 23-25): $19.5 million, 2,655 theaters, No. 2 behind "Clayface"
• Running domestic total: $45,145,476 against a reported $7 million production budget
• Next stop: wide release in the United Kingdom and Ireland on November 20

A platform release that went the other way

Most documentaries, even acclaimed ones, open narrow and shrink. "You Can See Everything" did the opposite, following a staged rollout that began five weeks before wide release with a secretive premiere at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend, where it screened without an advance title announcement; festival photographs placed Fielder and Oppenheim at the festival's Herzog Theatre that weekend.

The Wrap reported that the film's $15.6 million opening weekend was the best for any documentary since 2013, when the boy-band film "One Direction: This Is Us" opened to $15.8 million. Excluding concert and music documentaries, that makes it the strongest opening since Michael Moore's 2004 film "Fahrenheit 9/11," whose $23.9 million debut remains the all-time unadjusted record for the category.

Inside the project

The film, distributed domestically by A24 with international rights held by Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions, began in 2023, when Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, invited Fielder and Oppenheim to document their lives at a rented beach house in Del Mar, California, roughly five weeks before Holmes began an 11-year federal prison sentence. Holmes was convicted in January 2022 of defrauding investors over Theranos, the blood-testing startup she founded and ran as chief executive; former company president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani was convicted on related charges later the same year. The case had first drawn regulatory action in 2018, when the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Holmes, Theranos and Balwani with civil fraud, alleging the company's finger-prick blood analyzer could run only a small number of tests despite claims it could perform hundreds. Holmes settled the SEC's civil case without admitting or denying wrongdoing, agreeing to a $500,000 penalty and a 10-year bar on serving as an officer or director of a public company.

According to A24's official synopsis, the film grew into what it calls a three-year journey rather than the intimate portrait the directors initially set out to make. Fielder, making his feature directing debut, built his reputation on Comedy Central's "Nathan For You" and HBO's "The Rehearsal," both built around elaborately staged scenarios that blur performance and documentary fact; Oppenheim, a documentarian known for the HBO film "Ren Faire" and the Max series "Spermworld," has worked in similar territory, following real subjects into situations that start to resemble constructed drama. Fielder has said in interviews tied to the release that he came to suspect Holmes and Evans were withholding information during filming; Holmes, in the documentary, denies that she misled anyone about Theranos. Two years after the beach-house footage, Fielder followed Evans as he launched a new venture, Haemanthus, and the film depicts Evans exerting control over Holmes's public image and the filmmakers' access to her.

Unable to film certain encounters, Fielder restaged them using actors: Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in Hulu's 2019 limited series "The Dropout," reenacts scenes as both herself and a dramatized version of Holmes, while Christopher Abbott plays a dramatized Evans. The film also includes a prison visit Fielder made to Holmes. A closing title card states that Evans gave up a profit-sharing stake in the project before its release — a disclosure that sits inside the same ethical tangle over access, control and performance that the film sets out to document rather than resolve.

What happens next

A24 has not said how long it intends to keep expanding the release, though the theater-count jump between the film's first two weekends suggests the studio is treating it as a specialty-to-wide crossover rather than a standard limited run. The documentary is scheduled to open in the United Kingdom and Ireland on November 20 through Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions. Its unusual box office path, paired with Fielder's profile from "The Rehearsal" and the involvement of Seyfried and Abbott, has also fed early awards-season chatter about the documentary feature race, though no nominating body has yet weighed in this cycle.

For exhibitors, the film's trajectory is being watched as a test of whether adult-skewing, true-crime-adjacent documentaries can still draw crowds in theaters rather than waiting for streaming. For A24, it extends a run of nonfiction and docu-hybrid titles the studio has backed in recent years. For Holmes, now serving her sentence at a federal prison, the film adds another chapter to a public narrative she has had limited ability to control — which is, according to A24's own description of the project, close to the point.