A24 Documentary 'You Can See Everything' Adds Another $19.5 Million in Second Weekend, Sets Single-Day Documentary Record on Second Friday
A24's documentary You Can See Everything is rewriting the box-office rules for documentaries. According to multiple box-office trackers, the film grossed roughly another $19.5 million in North America in its second weekend, rising rather than falling compared with its opening weekend; its second Friday alone took in about $6.1 million, up roughly 174.6% from the previous Friday, a new single-day record for a documentary. The film expanded rapidly from about 855 theaters on opening weekend to about 2,655 theaters while maintaining strong attendance.
Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the film follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes through a period of her life before she entered prison to serve her sentence. The crew lived alongside her for weeks, filming over a span of three years, and that near-immersive approach itself sparked ethical debate about informed consent, staging and the subject's agency. But it was precisely that controversy and word of mouth that let the film break beyond the usual documentary audience. On opening weekend it took about $15 million from just 855 theaters — a per-theater average of about $17,544, higher than the large-scale release Street Fighter in the same frame.
One note on the box-office figures: by Box Office Mojo's accounting, the film had cumulated about $31.8 million in eight days; other reports put the cumulative total after the second weekend higher, with different cut-off times and theater scopes, so citations should state the source. The production budget was reportedly under $10 million, and at the current pace the profit margin has already opened up while awards-season discussion heats up. For the documentary industry, the significance lies not in one film's success or failure, but in the proof that in the streaming era, a sharply focused, intimately made documentary can still build a long theatrical run on word of mouth rather than playing only in small limited releases.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 影院放映厅内景，Wikimedia Commons，CC BY-SA 4.0
