Nathan Fielder's Holmes film proves weird docs can go wide

When was the last time a nearly three-hour documentary about a disgraced Silicon Valley founder was treated like a multiplex event? If your answer is "never," you're in good company, and that's exactly why You Can See Everything matters more than its grosses alone.

Here is what we know. A24 released the film, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, on October 16. Variety reported an opening of $15 million from just 855 theaters. Wikipedia lists a $7 million production budget and a gross of $23.4 million so far. A forum thread on r/boxoffice, which we treat only as unconfirmed chatter, talks of an expansion to at least 2,600 theaters this weekend. The runtime, per IMDb, is 2 hours 54 minutes.

The "niche" label was always a budget excuse

Look at what this thing is. It follows Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans before she begins a federal prison sentence, and then mutates: reenactments, an actress revisiting a role, a director whose objectivity gets questioned. As the Hollywood Reporter describes it, the New York Film Festival crowd screamed at the twists as if A24 were re-releasing Midsommar. That is not the profile of a polite, educational documentary.

Studios usually file such projects under "prestige streaming content" or "festival item." The implicit logic: odd form equals small audience. A $7 million film that has already grossed more than three times its budget says, in our view, that the logic is lazy. The audience isn't allergic to strangeness. It is allergic to blandness.

And consider the scale of the ask. This is a film that demands nearly three hours of your evening, in a market where executives routinely worry that anything over two hours needs a superhero attached. People are turning up anyway. We think that tells you less about the documentary boom and more about how much appetite there is for something that doesn't feel like it was assembled from market research.

Authorship is the marketing

What sold this film? Not a franchise, not a star vehicle. The Hollywood Reporter quotes NYFF programming chief Dennis Lim introducing the screening and referring to the teaser: "This is three hours of that." He had just described one minute of that teaser as the thing that made "the world, or at least the Internet, lose its collective mind." Add Fielder's The Rehearsal pedigree and you have a brand built on a person's sensibility.

That's the lesson we'd want executives to take. A distinctive voice is a pre-built marketing campaign, and the secrecy helps. The filmmakers asked audiences to preserve the discovery, which makes seeing it in a theater, with strangers, part of the product. Spoiler-avoidance is a great reason to buy a ticket this weekend rather than wait for a platform.

Don't overlearn the wrong lesson

Now the caveats, because they're real. The subject is a household-name scandal, so there was built-in curiosity. A24 also appears to have expanded in steps rather than flooding screens on day one, starting with 855 theaters, and that patience looks smart to us. We suspect studios will do the opposite of what we'd hope: chase "true-crime-but-meta" clones with none of the access or the nerve.

Fielder said himself that he spent months shooting without knowing whether anything would materialize, and the Hollywood Reporter says A24 gave him an escape hatch should he decide there wasn't enough. That tolerance for risk is the real asset, and in our opinion it can't be copied by a spreadsheet.

The verdict

Wide release for weird docs shouldn't be an exception granted to one comedian and one scandal. Give distinctive filmmakers modest budgets, let word of mouth do the work, and expand when the numbers justify it. You Can See Everything looks like it is doing exactly that. If you're deciding whether to see it in a theater, we'd say go, with as little prior knowledge as you can manage. And if you run a studio, stop saying "niche" until you've checked this weekend's numbers.