According to Deadline, A24's three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary "You Can See Everything" is expected to lead the weak Halloween frame with more than $10 million, for a U.S. 14-day cume of $52.7 million.
A three-hour documentary about a convicted fraudster is the Halloween movie. The projection is down about 40 percent from its $19.5 million the week before, against "Clayface" falling roughly 60 percent off a $33.6 million opening, and the notable new release of the frame is "Christmas at the Kringles" — a holiday slasher with a 0 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes opening in 1,825 theaters into a weekend that was already dead.
The genre math is the story. Halloween is the horror genre's payday, and this year it falls on a Saturday, which is the box office's worst alignment — the last time it happened was 2015, not counting the year the theaters were closed. A 180-minute film about a woman serving an eleven-year sentence is outdrawing the genre films on their own holiday, and not because it's better, but because it's a thing that already happened. It has already passed "Bowling for Columbine," "An Inconvenient Truth" and "Hubble 3D" on the all-time documentary chart. The only thing between a fraud documentary and Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" record of $119.1 million is a few more weeks.
The costumes did the rest. Deadline reports that Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder are the "it" costumes of the year, and the morning-show machine agreed: Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos' 60-plus-costume Halloween special includes Holmes. A woman who pleaded guilty to defrauding investors is now what your neighbor is wearing to the party. The studio's marketing department did almost nothing. The audience did all the work — the memes, the dress-ups, the three-hour matinee sacrifice. That's not marketing. That's a cult with a ticketing window.
The report's own question is the whole story: will moviegoers "take three hours out of their festivities" to watch this movie? The answer, per the projection, is yes. Hundreds of thousands of them, on a holiday built on costumes, where the most popular costume is the subject of the film.
YOUR TURN: A fraudster's documentary outdraws horror movies on Halloween, and people dress up as her. At what point does the con become the content, and the content become the costume?
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