UK cinemas report ‘bonkers’ demand for documentary You Can See Everything

It is the film everyone seems to be talking about, spawning memes and fuelling feverish online debate about its subject, the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Now, a month before Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything reaches UK cinemas, tickets for screenings are already selling out after its remarkable $15m (£11.3m) opening weekend in the US.

Clare Binns, the creative director of Picturehouse Cinemas, said the excitement was reminiscent of the response to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which became a global box-office phenomenon in 2023.

“People are hungry in a way that we haven’t really seen since then,” she said. “And for it to be a three-hour documentary, it’s bonkers.”

Tickets for the film, which opens in the UK on 20 November, went on sale at Picturehouse Central in London before its US opening, Binns said, and demand has prompted the chain to add extra screenings. At the Ritzy in Brixton, the first screen had almost sold out, leading the cinema to sell tickets for a showing at a second.

“It’s fantastic, it proves again that there’s a different kind of audience coming to the cinema,” Binns said. “They came to see Backrooms, they came to see Obsession, they came to see NAZA.

“There’s a real appetite for smart films that talk to an audience differently than the studios have talked to them before. With this documentary, you’ve got a story that has been mined to some extent with the Dropout and podcasts. But I think the fact that Nathan Fielder spent a month with Elizabeth Holmes is a huge draw. He’s a smart guy, and audiences want something they can relate to.”

Cineworld has also reported strong demand. Stuart Crane, its international vice-president of content, said “the speed and scale of demand has been remarkable”.

Initial screenings at Cineworld Leicester Square sold out after tickets went on sale at about 40 cinemas on Sunday. The chain has since added more screenings at Leicester Square and expanded bookings to a further 35 cinemas nationwide.

Vue has reported similar excitement. Dean Cross, its senior screen content manager, said it was “seeing incredible buzz both within the industry and amongst cinemagoers”, and it was “particularly encouraging to see a documentary capturing the attention of younger audiences”.

The momentum for You Can See Everything has been building since it was unveiled at a secret screening at the Telluride film festival in Colorado in September, where audiences were required to surrender their phones. A teaser trailer released the same day quickly went viral, with Holmes herself joining the online conversation, responding to tweets about the film and its trailer.

Co-directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the film has won widespread critical acclaim. The Guardian described it as “a modern masterpiece of deceit”, praising its unsettling exploration of Holmes and the blurred boundaries between documentary and performance.

Its US opening was the biggest for a documentary in more than 20 years, with more than 2,000 screenings selling out at 855 cinemas. More than 70% of its opening-weekend audience was under 35.

“People want to enjoy films in a cinema with other people,” Binns said. “The younger demographic want shared experiences. They want to talk about it with their friends, and you can’t do that when you’re sitting on your own watching a TV.

“Cinema has been ruled out so many times. Covid, the rise of streamers. Everybody is aware cinema has to change, it has to offer customers something different. But never rule us out.”