It’s a historic weekend for indie films at the box office as A24’s “You Can See Everything” has broken through the industry-wide malaise that has plagued documentaries for the past five years with an estimated $15 million opening weekend from just 855 locations, taking the No. 2 spot on the weekend charts with a per theater average of $17,543.
Riding off the back of unanimous critical acclaim and sky-high audience scores, Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder’s mind-bending look inside the private life of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has earned the highest opening weekend for any documentary since at least 2013, topping the $7.1 million of Amazon MGM’s MAGA doc “Melania,” which opened with more than double the screen count of “YCSE” at 1,778 locations this past February.
That screen count, combined with the overwhelming demand for the film in major cities, has led to more than 2,000 sellout screenings as of Sunday morning, according to A24. It has also come with spectacular audience scores on PostTrak with 92% of audiences surveyed giving the film the highest rating of “definite recommend.” That is territory usually reserved for faith-based films and tops the scores of other smash box office hits this year like “The Odyssey,” which earned a “definite recommend” score of 81%.
Where this opening ranks in documentary box office history depends on whether you count concert films, which generally are able to mine a larger core audience than other types of docs. For all docs, “You Can See Everything” is the biggest opening since Morgan Spurlock’s 2013 concert film/behind-the-scenes doc “One Direction: This is Us,” which opened to $15.8 million from 2,735 screens when it was released by Sony/TriStar.
Remove music docs from the list, and this is the highest opening weekend since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” set the all-time unadjusted record for docs with $23.9 million back in 2004. Either way, this is going to be a low-budget hit for A24, which spent less than $10 million in combined production and marketing costs on this doc, which was kept secret throughout its production until it was unveiled at a surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.
Since that premiere, “You Can See Everything” has received some of the most effusive praise that any movie this year has received, holding a 99% critics and 98% Rotten Tomatoes score. There’s even buzz that the film may be able to become the first documentary in history to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
While A24 is getting most of the attention, there was also some good news on the platform release front with “La Bola Negra,” Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s Cannes award-winning queer epic set before, during and decades after the Spanish Civil War. In the U.S., it is also notable for being the first movie that its distributor, Netflix, is reporting box office numbers for after years of keeping them under wraps, leaving trade publications to report the numbers for movies like “Glass Onion” and “KPop Demon Hunters” through exhibitor sources.
Netflix is reporting approximately $277,500 from just four screens in New York and Los Angeles for a per theater average of approximately $69,375, which would be the second highest per theater average ever in the United States for a non-English language film behind the $125,421 record held by Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture winner “Parasite.”
“La Bola Negra” is a top contender to be nominated for Best Picture and Best International Film come January, having won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival and the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Netflix will expand the film to San Francisco and Toronto next weekend along with new locations in New York and Los Angeles, steadily rolling out nationwide until it reaches an estimated screen count somewhere between 200 and 300 screens in early November. The film will have a 47-day theatrical window and will be released on streaming on Dec. 2.
Another major specialty release this weekend was “The Devils,” Ken Russell’s 1971 NC-17-rated historical drama about religious manipulation that is being released uncut theatrically for the first time ever for a one-week limited engagement. The movie has earned $1.6 million from 350 locations — including 11 that screened the film in 35mm — for a per theater average of $4,686.
“The Devils” is the first theatrical release from Clockwork, the new Warner Bros. specialty division launched by former film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy and run by former Neon exec Christian Parkes. Clockwork is expected to move forward under ownership by Skydance following its acquisition of Warner Bros.
More to come…