The rumor that had circulated for years is now a dated release plan. A24 has confirmed You Can See Everything, a documentary on convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, and set it for a theatrical run in October. The film had its world premiere as the secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival, and a first teaser is now out.
What the film actually is
Per A24’s synopsis, Holmes invited a skeptical crew to film her in the 34 days before she reported to prison, and what started as a portrait of an “enigmatic felon” turned into a three-year shoot. The teaser shows Fielder pressing Holmes on whether she is being “real” while she holds her newborn — a scene that tells you the register here is discomfort, not explainer.
Holmes began her sentence in May 2023 and is serving more than 11 years. She was acquitted on charges of defrauding patients but convicted of defrauding investors, alongside former Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.
Why the theatrical route matters
Most true-crime and founder-fraud content in the last five years has gone straight to streaming, where it functions as acquisition and retention fuel. A24 doing a cinema window first is a different play, and it is a familiar one for the studio: build festival heat, run a targeted theatrical release, then monetise on premium VOD and a downstream streaming licence at a higher price than a direct-to-platform commission would have fetched.
For anyone tracking specialty box office, this is a documentary with three unusual advantages at once:
- A pre-sold subject. The Theranos story already carried Alex Gibney’s 2019 doc The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley and Hulu’s The Dropout with Amanda Seyfried. Audience awareness costs almost nothing to build.
- An access hook nobody else has. Holmes has not sat for anything like this. Exclusive access is the single most defensible asset in non-fiction.
- A director with a fandom, not just a credit. Fielder’s Nathan for You and HBO’s The Rehearsal command an audience that shows up on opening weekend and argues about the film online for a month.
The Fielder-Oppenheim combination is the story
Fielder builds comedy out of real people and elaborate constructed situations. Oppenheim comes from a more classical, visually driven documentary tradition — Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and HBO’s Ren Faire — and has just moved into narrative with A24’s Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, which drew strong reviews at Venice.
That pairing signals a film about the mechanics of performance rather than a chronology of the fraud. It also explains why the project stayed quiet: an access documentary loses its subject the moment the subject reads a headline about it.
What buyers and planners should watch
Three numbers will decide how this is remembered. First, the opening per-screen average — specialty docs live or die on that figure before any wide expansion. Second, the length of the theatrical window before PVOD, which tells you how much confidence A24 has in word of mouth. Third, whichever streamer eventually takes it: a documentary that has already been talked about for a month arrives on a platform with unusually low marketing cost per view, which is exactly why services keep bidding for festival titles they did not commission.
For Indian planners, the read-through is narrower but real. Founder-fraud non-fiction travels well on OTT here, and a Fielder title carries a young, urban, English-first audience that overlaps neatly with premium subscription tiers. Expect a streaming pickup rather than a meaningful Indian theatrical footprint.
Source: TheWrap
