Melania Trump’s big-budget documentary just got upstaged by a scrappy film about a convicted fraudster.
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” grossed an estimated $15 million over the weekend of Oct. 16-18, 2026, more than double the opening of First Lady Melania Trump’s documentary, which played on twice as many screens.
A24 put the nearly three-hour film into just 855 theaters across the U.S. and Canada, where it averaged about $17,544 a location and racked up more than 2,000 sold-out screenings, according to the distributor. Only one title beat it. Paramount’s video game adaptation “Street Fighter” opened to $30 million to $31 million in Sunday estimates from 3,575 venues, averaging $8,671 a location.
That gives “You Can See Everything” the second-biggest documentary opening on record, behind only Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which debuted to $23.9 million from 868 screens in 2004 and finished with a genre-record $119.2 million domestically. It also scored the largest debut for any film playing on fewer than 1,000 screens since “Borat” opened to about $26 million from 837 theaters in 2006. Neither comparison accounts for inflation.
A Documentary That Plays Like a Blockbuster
Nonfiction almost never performs like this. “This is a giant weekend for the genre,” David A. Gross, who publishes the box office newsletter FranchiseRe, told Variety, adding that documentaries rarely receive a wide release and typically take in $3 million over their first three days.
How “Melania” Stacks Up
Then there is “Melania.” The Brett Ratner-directed Amazon MGM documentary about the first lady opened to $7.1 million across 1,778 locations in late January 2026 — at the time the biggest start for a non-music documentary in more than a decade, and a success by documentary standards — and ended its domestic run at about $16 million. The Holmes film came within roughly $1 million of that total in three days.
The spending gap is wider still. “You Can See Everything” was made in secret over three years for roughly $7 million, with marketing reported at less than $10 million and a combined production-and-marketing figure put under $20 million. “Melania” has been tallied at $27 million to produce and market by one accounting, while Amazon MGM reportedly paid $40 million for the rights and spent about $35 million on marketing. The reviews diverge just as sharply: the Holmes film holds a 99 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 99 on Metacritic, while “Melania” sits at 9 percent.
The 34 Days Before Prison
The movie, which made a surprise world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado on Sept. 6, follows the Theranos founder over the 34 days before she began a federal prison sentence of more than 11 years for defrauding investors. Fielder spent over a month with Holmes, her partner Billy Evans and her two young children before she reported to prison in 2023, and he appears on camera interviewing the couple. Holmes tried to convince the filmmakers of her innocence. The film also takes up her relationship with Evans, her MAGA evolution and her reaction to being portrayed by Amanda Seyfried in Hulu’s “The Dropout.”
A Record Letterboxd Score and Oscar Talk
Audiences backed up the critics. More than 70 percent of the opening weekend crowd was under 35, and in exit polls 90 percent of ticket buyers said they would definitely recommend the film while 80 percent rated it above what they had anticipated. Its 4.8 average on Letterboxd is the highest the platform has recorded, and awards watchers are now debating whether it could become the first documentary ever nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends for Rentrak, said Fielder’s huge social media following helped pull in moviegoers who might otherwise have balked at a three-hour documentary. “Elizabeth Holmes is just a character that you couldn’t even make up,” he said. Oppenheim is on a run of his own: his A24 feature “Primetime” has earned nearly $50 million against a $15 million budget. The overall domestic box office came to about $101.6 million for the weekend, up 45 percent from the same weekend a year earlier, and “You Can See Everything” expands nationwide in the coming weeks.