A24's You Can See Everything topped the weekday box office. The reasons say a lot about audiences under 35.
Documentaries rarely win a day at the box office, so the headline in TheWrap's Monday report stood out: A24's You Can See Everything was the number-one film in North America on October 19, earning roughly $2.5 million and edging past Paramount and Legendary's Street Fighter, which took about $2 million.
Read the number carefully
It is worth being precise about what happened. Street Fighter opened at number one for the weekend with $31 million in the US and Canada, so over the full weekend it won comfortably. The documentary's win is a single Monday, and it came from a much smaller footprint: 855 locations. Spread over those screens, about $2.5 million works out to roughly $3,000 a location in a single day, which is the kind of average that tells distributors a film has real pull.
Why people are going
The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival to strong reviews and was directed by Lance Oppenheim with Nathan Fielder in front of the camera. According to A24's own audience polling, reported by TheWrap, 70 percent of respondents named Fielder as a major reason they bought a ticket, and 70 percent of the opening-weekend audience was under 35. That is a notable detail for a genre often assumed to skew older.
The economics
- The film cost about $7 million to make, less than Oppenheim's other fall release for A24, Primetime.
- Primetime made $1.7 million on its first Monday after an $18.8 million opening from 2,874 locations, and has passed $45 million domestically after four weekends.
- TheWrap says You Can See Everything is expected to overtake Won't You Be My Neighbor? as the highest-grossing documentary of the past decade by next weekend, and notes that no documentary has performed this well in more than 15 years.
What it suggests
A small budget, a festival reputation and a star with a devoted online following turned out to be a strong combination. Studios often assume that younger audiences only show up for franchises, so a nonfiction film pulling a young crowd is a useful counterexample. One strong Monday does not make a trend, and weekday numbers can be flattered by school and work schedules, but the early signal is that curiosity and a distinctive voice can still sell tickets.
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Picture credit: A24
