You Can See Everything documentary lifts The Dropout viewership by 186%
The You Can See Everything documentary sent viewing of The Dropout, Hulu's 2022 series starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes, up 186% in September versus the month before, Variety reported.
You Can See Everything documentary lifts The Dropout viewership by 186%
The You Can See Everything documentary drove viewership of The Dropout, Hulu's 2022 series starring Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes, up 186% in September compared with the month prior, according to Variety. John Carreyrou's 2018 book Bad Blood also returned to the New York Times bestseller list.
A streaming surge after the teaser
The jump followed the 6 September announcement of the first teaser for the previously secret film. Interest kept building as the premiere approached:
- Viewership of The Dropout rose another 92% in the week of 12 October, the days before the film's 16 October premiere.
- Bad Blood, Carreyrou's 2018 book on the Theranos scandal, went back onto the New York Times bestseller list.
The three-hour film was produced by A24 and directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim.
The film's record opening
You Can See Everything opened to $15m in North America on just 855 screens, the best opening weekend for a documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. It was also the best opening for a film on fewer than 1,000 screens since Borat opened to $26.5m in 2006, with a reported 2,000 sold-out screenings over the weekend. On Monday, the film pushed the weekend's champion, the video game adaptation Street Fighter, to second place on the box office chart.
Who Elizabeth Holmes is and what the film covers
Holmes was at one point the youngest female self-made billionaire in the US, with a net worth of $4.5bn by the time she was 30. She left Theranos in 2018 after Carreyrou's reporting revealed that she and others knew the devices could not accurately test blood samples, and the company collapsed shortly afterward. The film was shot largely in secret in 2023, in the month before Holmes began an 11-year prison sentence for fraud.
Reception and awards plans
The documentary holds a close-to-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, a 97 on Metacritic, and ranks among the highest-rated films of all time on Letterboxd. The Guardian's five-star review called it "a stupefying and gloriously destabilizing hall of psychological mirrors, a thrilling once-in-a-lifetime collision of director and subject".
Pundits predict it could become the first documentary nominated for the best picture Oscar. A24 will submit it for cinematography, score, director, costume design, production design, and makeup and hairstyling, in addition to best documentary. Variety confirmed on Tuesday that Amanda Seyfried will be campaigned for best supporting actress.
The film will expand to at least 2,600 screens on its second domestic weekend, and premiere in Australia on 12 November and in the UK on 20 November.
