EDITORIAL

‘YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING’ Is Now Second in Best Picture Odds. Can a Documentary Actually Win?

By Matt Oakes · October 18, 2026

Hype is a strange bag of tricks but all things point to the same conclusion: You Can See Everything is the real thing. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary opened to a staggering $15 million from just 855 screens this weekend, roughly double what anyone expected and the second-best opening ever for a non-music documentary, trailing only Fahrenheit 9/11‘s $23.9 million in the white-hot election year of 2004. On a $7 million budget, it’s already a hit. A big one.

The reviews are something else entirely. As of this writing, it holds a 99 on Metacritic from 37 critics, a 99% critics score and a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, as well as a 4.8 average on Letterboxd – the highest average score ever recorded. On IMDb, it’s tied with The Shawshank Redemption for the highest user rating ever. I personally gave it an A+ in my review. By almost every measure we have, this is one of the best-reviewed films ever made, and it’s a three-hour documentary about a convicted fraudster America was supposedly sick of hearing about. How does this even make sense and what is the limit of You Can See Everything‘s success?

Part of the answer is hiding in the title. Without spoiling anything, one of the film’s most revealing threads is Holmes’ relationship with a single, slippery word. When Theranos promised its machine could run hundreds of tests from a single drop of blood, she argues, “can” was never a statement of fact. It was a statement of possibility, a future that just hadn’t arrived yet. In her telling, the technology wasn’t a lie so much as a forecast running late. You Can See Everything plays the same trick on its audience. It promises total access, and it delivers, sort of. You can see everything. Whether you understand it, or believe it, is another matter entirely.

A24 understood that better than anyone, and sold the movie by showing us almost nothing. Fielder and Oppenheim filmed in secret for years, following Holmes in the weeks before she reported to federal prison in 2023 and for three years after. Nobody knew the film existed until a surprise premiere at Telluride, where audiences had to surrender their phones at the door. The trailer was all pull quotes and no plot, and critics wrote around the movie rather than about it, nearly all of them landing on some version of “see it before anyone tells you anything.” In a culture where everything gets spoiled by lunchtime, that turned a documentary into a cultural event. Accordingly, A24 reported more than 2,000 sellouts on opening weekend. Again, truly insane for a doc.

It’s guerrilla marketing in its purest form: make the mystery the product. Studios spend hundreds of millions telling us everything; A24 told us nothing and sold out theaters coast to coast. It caps a remarkable run for a company that was nursing costly flops a year ago and has since landed Marty Supreme ($192.4 million) and Backrooms (more than $400 million on a $10 million budget). Less really can be more. At least when the movie delivers.

All of which brings us to the Oscars, and a question the Academy has never had to seriously answer. Best Documentary Feature looks like a lock, and I fully expect You Can See Everything to become the first documentary ever nominated for Best Picture. But nonfiction has never really come close. Woodstock earned Editing and Sound nominations in 1971, Hoop Dreams famously landed an Editing nod in 1995 after being shut out of the documentary race, and Flee made history in 2022 with nominations for Best Documentary, Animated, and International Feature. Festivals have been bolder (Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d’Or, and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed took Venice’s Golden Lion), but the Academy’s top category has stayed closed for nearly a century.

Then again, is this even a documentary? Fielder is on screen constantly, steering events, breaking the fourth wall and engineering situations that wouldn’t exist without his camera. Some moments were restaged with an actress. It’s nonfiction the way The Rehearsal is nonfiction: real people, real stakes, wildly manufactured circumstances. The documentary world has wrestled with this for decades. Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line used stylized reenactments and was famously ignored by the Academy, even as it helped free a wrongly convicted man. The Act of Killing, in which Indonesian death-squad leaders restage their own crimes, earned a nomination, and Exit Through the Gift Shop got one amid open speculation that the whole thing was a prank. The irony is that this hybrid nature might be the film’s best Best Picture argument. If voters stop thinking of it as a documentary and start thinking of it as a movie, the genre ceiling maybe starts to matter quite a bit less.

Winning, though, is a different beast, and a lot has to break right. First, it has to escape the hard lines of the documentary box. Best Picture winners almost always earn nominations for directing and editing, which nonfiction basically never gets, so a Best Director nod for Fielder and Oppenheim would change the conversation overnight. Second, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the frontrunner since July, has to stumble or split the blockbuster vote with Dune: Part Three and company. As of this writing, Kalshi has The Odysseyat 48% to win, with You Can See Everything already up to 21%, second only to Nolan. Still, voters just crowned Nolan for Oppenheimer, and the Academy doesn’t always rush to repeat itself.

Third, the preferential ballot has to do its thing. Best Picture isn’t won on first-place votes alone; voters rank every nominee, and the film with the broadest support wins, which is how consensus picks like CODA and Green Book toppled flashier frontrunners. A 99 on Metacritic is about as consensus as it gets. Finally, A24, which has won Best Picture twice with Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once, has to keep this thing an event through nominations voting in January while weathering the inevitable authenticity debate over restaged scenes. Any whiff of controversy gives wavering voters an easy excuse to rank it lower.

So can it win? The nomination is coming. The win is a long shot as long as The Odyssey holds, but “long shot” and “impossible” aren’t the same word, and Holmes would be the first to tell you how much room there is between “can” and “will.” We’ll know more when nominations arrive on January 21, 2027.

If anyone can turn the theoretical into the actual, it’s Fielder, who has been building toward this for over a decade. Nathan for You used a fake business-consulting show to expose how far real people will go for a camera. The Rehearsal turned the idea inward, staging simulations of real life until nobody, Fielder included, could tell where the performance ended. The Curse, which he co-created with Benny Safdie and starred in opposite Emma Stone, pushed the same discomfort into scripted drama. Oppenheim, meanwhile, found strange, lonely beauty in a Florida retirement community with Some Kind of Heaven, turned a Texas Renaissance festival’s succession fight into prestige drama with HBO’s Ren Faire and is coming off another A24 hit this year, the Robert Pattinson-led Primetime. Point the two of them at Holmes and you get the world’s most famous con artist meeting the masters of manufactured reality. A match made in Silicon Valley hell.

There’s a fitting irony at the heart of all this. You Can See Everything is a film about whether we can believe what we’re shown, and it became a phenomenon by asking audiences to trust it sight unseen. They did, and it paid them back with interest. Whatever happens in January, if you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading coverage (yes, including this), find a theater and go in cold. Bring a friend. Leave your phone. Trust nothing. You can see everything, after all. But can we see a documentary win best picture? The jury is out.