The excitement around Nathan Fielder’s documentary is continuing to grow, with a 25 per cent increase in box office reported this weekend.
was only unveiled last month at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival and hit US cinemas on October 16. The documentary follows filmmaker Nathan Fielder after he moves in with health businesswoman Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks leading up to her imprisonment for fraud in 2023.
Holmes founded medical company Theranos in 2003 and in the early 2010s, they claimed to have revolutionised blood testing. In 2015, it was reported that Holmes was the youngest self-made female billionaire in the United States. The same year, Theranos was accused of deceiving the public over their blood testing claims.
In 2023, she was convicted of defrauding investors and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Along with the company’s former COO Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, she was also ordered to pay $452million in restitution to victims of the fraud.
The first trailer for blew up across social media, with many comparing it to a living horror. The documentary went on to take $5.5million on its first day and across its opening weekend, took $15.6million against a budget of $7million.
The hype around the project has continued to grow. This weekend, saw a 25 per cent increase in box office sales and is on track to become the most successful non-musical documentary of this century. That record is currently held by Michael Moore’s 2004 doc , which grossed more than $220million.
hits UK cinemas next month (November 20) and tickets for screenings are already selling out. “People are hungry in a way that we haven’t really seen since [Barbie]. And for it to be a three-hour documentary, it’s bonkers,” Picturehouse Cinema’s Clare Binn told .
“There’s a real appetite for smart films that talk to an audience differently than the studios have talked to them before,” she continued. “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.”
“In my mind, she was guilty,” Fielder said about the project in an interview with W . “But I was very interested in her and her situation. Curiosity drove me. I’ve always tried to find out the truth in any situation, even if there’s a lot of artifice involved. But when I met Elizabeth, she was so different than I thought she would be. She was disarming in real life. I told her right away that I believed everything that I’d read about her, but that didn’t frighten her.”