The Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Took 15 Million Dollars on Its Opening Weekend, the Second-Best Documentary Opening Ever: The Theranos Fraud Still Sells

The documentary "You Can See Everything" about Elizabeth Holmes took 15 million dollars (about 13 million euros) on its opening weekend in US cinemas, according to Sunday estimates. That is the second-biggest opening for a documentary in history. The film runs almost three hours and is showing in only 855 cinemas - for comparison, "Street Fighter", the weekend's number one, is in 3,575. There is also talk of 2,000 sold-out screenings.

The story is familiar to the point of exhaustion. Holmes founded Theranos, promised complete blood tests from a single drop of blood, raised money from investors and ended up with a 2022 sentence: 11 years in prison for defrauding investors. There are already books, podcasts, TV series and documentaries about her. So why one more?

The answer is access. The filmmakers filmed Holmes and her family in the month before she went to prison. The directors are Nathan Fielder, creator of the series "The Rehearsal" and known for his deadpan humour, and Lance Oppenheim. The film was first shown last month at a secret screening at the Telluride festival, and it now holds a score of 99 percent on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. One American journalist who saw it wrote that Holmes seems to have found her match in Fielder.

The contrast with the other films about tech idols is stark. Aaron Sorkin's "The Social Reckoning", about Facebook, opened with 5.5 million dollars and has already dropped out of the top ten. Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary "Musk" took only 306,702 dollars this weekend, partly because of social media backlash, partly because of its length.

Would audiences rather watch the fall of someone who lied than a portrait of someone who is still in charge? This weekend's numbers, at least, don't say otherwise.