A24’s 3-Hour Viral Sensation Is Officially Becoming a Box Office Monster

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema. 

Coming off its record-breaking box-office debut last weekend, A24’s You Can See Everything delivered a textbook wide expansion this weekend, nearly stealing the top spot from Clayface. The three-hour documentary film, co-directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows the disgraced entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in the days leading up to her incarceration for fraud. Holmes’ story has inspired the Hulu limited series The Dropout, and the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. A24 devised an engaging marketing strategy for the new movie, which was filmed covertly and revealed at a secret screening at September’s Telluride Film Festival.

The movie grossed $15 million in its first weekend at the domestic box office, playing in a little more than 800 theaters. This week, A24 expanded its theater count to more than 2,650. The distributor has successfully leveled up, as promised, in recent years thanks to films such as Civil War, The Drama, and Primetime. The horror sensation Backrooms became the highest-grossing A24 movie of all time, with a global haul of $400 million against a reported budget of $10 million. Like that film, You Can See Everything has received excellent reviews. Reports say A24 will campaign for a Best Picture nomination, which would be a first for a documentary movie.

Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours.
Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from
the encounter.

Your nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you
completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the
conversation is.

• Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He
  never raises his voice, because he has never needed to.
• You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve
  is exactly the door he would knock on.
• The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence.
  It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person.
• He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part.

Your nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is
after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on.

• The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence
  against him. It is the entire reason he showed up.
• He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool
  you would normally reach for.
• His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend
  the rest of your life proving him wrong.
• He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life.

Your nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work
out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time.

• Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from:
  a mind the equal of the hero’s, pointed the wrong way.
• You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he
  has already built the room.
• This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs
  the game to be worth playing.
• It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down.

Your nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that
is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way.

• Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the
  answer was decided long before you opened your mouth.
• You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no
  interest in how capable you are.
• No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences
  quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work.
• Call it. He will wait.

Here’s How Much ‘You Can See Everything’ Grossed This Weekend

Image via A24

Image via A24

Image via A24

Image via A24

The film now holds a “Certified Fresh” 98% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “Nathan Fielder’s ironclad commitment to the bit is pushed to its limit in You Can See Everything, an inscrutable Rorschach Test of Elizabeth Holmes’ psyche that’s as absorbing as it is haunting.” You Can See Everything added approximately $20 million to its tally this weekend, coming second on the domestic chart behind Clayface, which grossed more than $25 million. The film’s total domestic haul now stands at around $45 million, which is almost unheard of for a documentary feature, barring, of course, concert movies and nature films. Fahrenheit 9/11 holds the record for the highest-grossing traditional documentary of all time, with a $222 million global haul. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

You Can See Everything

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  Elizabeth Holmes

  Self

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• <

  Nathan Fielder

  Self / Elizabeth Holmes

• <

  Billy Evans

  Billy Evans

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  Amanda Seyfried