You Can See Everything documentary seen by many on huge box office debut
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A three-hour documentary on the tech fraudster Elizabeth Holmes has raked in a whopping $15 million (£11.25m) on its box office debut, despite a limited run at 855 screens across the US and Canada.
The eagerly anticipated film, You Can See Everything, finds Holmes letting filmmakers into her California home in 2023, during the month before she began an 11-year prison sentence.
It was co-directed by comedian Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim who find themselves embroiled in the story, growing suspicious that Holmes and her partner are withholding information.
US publication Deadline noted the film had enjoyed “easily the second best opening ever for a [non-music] documentary at the box office”, after Michael Moore’s 2004 film about the US’s invasion of Iraq, Fahrenheit 9/11.
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Ticket sales at the box office were enough for second place overall behind Paramount’s new video game movie adaptation, Street Fighter, which opened to $31 million in North America and $51.1 million globally.
You Can See Everything also secured the largest debut for any film playing on under 1,000 screens since 2006’s Borat, which scored $26 million.
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Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors in her medical testing company Theranos, fuelling a media circus that has been chronicled in books, podcasts and the mini-series The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried.
In You Can See Everything, Canadian comedian Fielder – known for his awkward, deadpan and at-times surreal humour, on shows including The Rehearsal and The Curse – places himself inside the action, once again blurring the lines between documentary, social experiment and prank show.
We see notorious Silicon Valley founder Holmes and her partner Billy Evans invite a sceptical film crew to document her every move, 34 days before she’s sent to prison.
Seyfried appears in the hybrid documentary to re-enact events and scenes that the documentary crew could not film or needed to reconstruct.
The first teaser trailer dropped last month, right after the film’s surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado.
It went viral and launched many online memes of Holmes unblinkingly asking first-time filmmaker, Fielder: “Why would I deceive you?”
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The stranger-than-fiction documentary has garnered rave reviews and is already being talked about as an Oscar contender as we head into awards season.
Remarkable really for a documentary that was produced in secret over three years, and which no-one really knew about until recently.
The Guardian awarded the film five stars, calling it “a modern masterpiece of deceit”, stressing how “TV’s grand illusionist meets his match when he moves in with Theranos founder and her family”.
The Financial Times also offered five stars describing the documentary as “a mind-bending revelation”.
The New York Times said viewers see Holmes and Fielder “joust in a dizzying movie about truth, reality and the contours of knowledge”.
The buzz around the film is likely to see it be in the running, at least, for a nomination for best documentary feature at next year’s Academy Awards, though no documentary has ever been nominated for the main prize of best picture.
