Elizabeth Holmes documentary "You Can See Everything" heads for a specialty box-office record

A24's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted founder of the failed blood-testing company Theranos, opened wider and stronger than distributors expected this weekend, putting an unusual true-crime art film on track to set a modern box-office record for the documentary genre. "You Can See Everything," co-directed by comedian Nathan Fielder and filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, began its theatrical run on Friday in 855 North American locations, a limited release intended to build word of mouth before a wider expansion later this month.

The film, which runs two hours and fifty-five minutes, follows Holmes in the weeks before she reported to federal prison in 2023 and continues for three years afterward, including scenes shot while she was incarcerated. A24's official synopsis describes it as a project that "becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss." The Motion Picture Association rated the film R, for language and some graphic nudity, a decision the ratings board confirmed in a post from its official account earlier this month.

A specialty-release surprise

The film earned an estimated $1.75 million in Thursday preview screenings, then $5.54 million on its Friday opening day, finishing second for the day behind the wide theatrical release of the video-game adaptation "Street Fighter," which took in roughly $13 million from 3,575 theaters, according to box-office figures reported by Variety. On a per-theater basis, the Holmes documentary outperformed the martial-arts tentpole by a wide margin, averaging roughly $6,480 per location on Friday against about $3,636 for "Street Fighter."

Analysts tracking the weekend now project "You Can See Everything" will gross about $12.45 million by Sunday, more than 50 percent above the $7 million to $8 million range distributors had initially forecast. That total would surpass the opening of Amazon MGM's "Melania," which took in $7.1 million from 1,778 theaters earlier this year and had stood as the strongest opening for a non-music documentary in roughly a decade, according to figures compiled by box-office tracker The Numbers. A24 has not released a per-screen average for the full weekend, and studios will not report final, audited numbers until Monday.

How the project came together

The documentary originated when Holmes, searching for someone to document her life as she prepared to surrender, was connected through an acquaintance to Oppenheim, the director behind the HBO documentary "Spermworld." He in turn brought in Fielder, best known for the comedy series "Nathan for You" and HBO's "The Rehearsal," both of which blur the line between documentary and staged performance. Fielder moved into Holmes's rented Southern California home roughly two weeks before she began serving an 11-year, three-month sentence for defrauding Theranos investors, patients and doctors, a term later reduced to about 123 months in March by a federal judge who found she had not personally caused "substantial financial hardship" to victims, a factor originally weighed in setting her sentence.

The original sentencing announcement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California described a scheme in which Holmes and Balwani raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors by claiming a proprietary device could run comprehensive blood tests from a single finger-prick sample, a claim prosecutors and a federal jury found to be fraudulent. Holmes is currently held at a minimum-security federal prison in Bryan, Texas, and, according to a victim notification reported by NBC News, is expected to move to a halfway house in Texas next year ahead of a projected 2030 release.

Filming continued on and off for roughly three years, according to A24 and multiple accounts of the production, with Fielder and Oppenheim retaining access to Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, well after she began her sentence. The film had its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on September 6 as a secret, phones-confiscated screening that was not announced on the festival's published schedule, generating days of speculation before A24 confirmed the project publicly.

Holmes's story has already been dramatized once, in Hulu's 2022 limited series "The Dropout," in which Amanda Seyfried won an Emmy for playing the Theranos founder. According to several reviews of "You Can See Everything," Seyfried herself appears late in the new film, brought in by the directors to help interpret footage of the real Holmes that both filmmakers said they struggled to make sense of on their own. The device situates the documentary as a kind of sequel to, and commentary on, the earlier fictionalized account, layering a second remove of performance onto a story already once removed from its subject.

The commercial result matters most immediately to A24, which has built a reputation and a business model on turning specialty, director-driven films into outsized hits relative to their cost, and to the theater chains now counting on the film's exclusivity window to pull in older, awards-attentive audiences that most documentaries do not reach. It is also significant for the broader documentary business, which has struggled for theatrical attention as streaming platforms absorbed much of the nonfiction market; a strong per-screen average for a three-hour film about a disgraced tech founder could encourage distributors to take similar bets on theatrical nonfiction rather than routing it directly to streaming.

For Holmes herself, the film represents a renewed, highly visible return to public attention roughly three years after her conviction, at a moment when her legal team has separately sought both a reduced sentence and a presidential commutation. Fielder has said Holmes and Evans, who appear to discuss rebuilding a "new and improved" version of her company while she was still imprisoned, dispute how she was characterized in earlier reporting, including a 2023 New York Times article that the paper has stood behind.

Critical reaction

Reviews have been largely enthusiastic, if unsettled by the film's ambiguity about its subject. Lindsey Bahr, the Associated Press film writer, gave the film four stars out of four, writing that it functions as a kind of collective performance.

"In some ways, it is a staggering piece of performance art by everyone involved. It's also wildly entertaining, confounding and wholly unique."

Fielder himself has described the experience of making the film in ambivalent terms, telling New York Times reporter Nicole Sperling that he struggled to process what he witnessed inside Holmes's household in the weeks before her imprisonment. "I don't know why I'm there," he said of his own presence in some of the film's most unresolved scenes, adding, "I'm really struggling to this day to understand what I experienced." That uncertainty, he said, is what kept the production going for three years rather than the few weeks originally planned.

Critics and commentators have also debated the ethics of a convicted fraudster receiving a platform, three years after jurors found she defrauded investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars, to shape her own story on screen. The film does not argue that Holmes is innocent, according to multiple reviews, but it also declines to resolve the question of how self-aware she is about her own account of events, a tension several critics have cited as the source of the film's unusual staying power at the box office this weekend.

What happens next

A24 is scheduled to expand "You Can See Everything" into wide release on October 23, adding theaters nationally after a week spent building on positive reviews and festival buzz. The studio has not announced a streaming or home-video date, though A24's recent documentaries have typically reached subscription platforms within several months of their theatrical runs. Official, audited weekend numbers are expected Monday, which will determine whether the film's final tally clears the documentary opening-weekend record now held by "Melania" and whether its per-screen average holds up as it moves into more theaters and a broader, less self-selecting audience.

Holmes, meanwhile, continues to serve her reduced sentence at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas. Her separate request for a presidential commutation remained pending as of earlier this year. The Bureau of Prisons has not said whether the film's release or its box-office performance will have any bearing on the handling of her case, and A24 has not said whether Holmes or her representatives will have any involvement in promoting the film as it widens into more theaters next week.