You Can See Everything, the A24 documentary that Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim shot inside Elizabeth Holmes's home in the weeks before she entered federal prison, took $15 million in its first weekend in US and Canadian cinemas, a figure that, according to Wikipedia, trails only Fahrenheit 9/11 among documentary openings. On October 19, 2026, Tyler Shultz, the former Theranos employee who helped expose the company in 2015, told CBS Mornings that the blood-testing device Holmes lays out on a table in the film "was not the device that I worked with 12 hours a day."

In Short

A new movie follows Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder convicted of cheating investors, in the weeks before she went to prison, and lots of people paid to see it on its first weekend. A former Theranos worker who blew the whistle on the company says the film lets her show off a machine that was never the one used on real patients. So the film is a big commercial success, but one of the people closest to the original story says it gives her too much room to plant doubt.

What the box office numbers say

The film was released by A24 on October 16, 2026, in the United States and Canada. Its first weekend ran from Friday, October 16, to Sunday, October 18.

On the morning of October 19, the CBS Mornings host who introduced the segment put the takings at "$15 million at the box office this weekend," calling it "the second highest opening for a documentary ever." Wikipedia's article on the film, last edited at 03:46 UTC on October 20, carries the same $15 million debut and the same ranking: second behind Fahrenheit 9/11, which opened to $23.9 million in 2004. It also places the documentary second for the weekend overall, behind Street Fighter.

The weekend did not start that way. According to Wikipedia, citing Variety, You Can See Everything was projected to gross $7-8 million from 855 theaters. After $5.5 million on its first day, including $1.8 million from Thursday night previews, weekend estimates were raised to $12-14 million. The final weekend figure came in above even the revised range.

Two other measures stand out. According to Wikipedia, citing Deadline, the documentary posted a per-venue average of $17,300, the highest for any film playing in fewer than 1,000 theaters since Borat ($31,600 in 2006), and there were reportedly more than 2,000 sold-out showings across the weekend. Against a production budget of $7 million, also according to Wikipedia, the film has already grossed more than twice its production budget in North America alone.

Where the figures differ

The sources do not agree on a single number, and the differences are worth spelling out.

  • CBS Mornings: "$15 million at the box office this weekend."
  • Wikipedia: a $15 million debut in the box-office section, and a total gross of $15.6 million in the infobox, sourced to The Numbers and retrieved on October 19.
  • IMDb: $15,601,418 listed as the US and Canada opening weekend (dated October 18, 2026), the same figure as the US and Canada gross and the worldwide gross.

The most likely reading is that $15 million was the Sunday estimate and $15.6 million is the reported actual for the same three days, but none of the documents says so directly. Wikipedia presents $15 million as the opening and $15.6 million as the running total, while IMDb treats $15.6 million as the opening itself. The IMDb worldwide figure equals the domestic one because, as of the capture, the film had only opened in the United States and Canada.

The critical aggregates diverge in a smaller way. According to Wikipedia, Metacritic assigned the film a score of 97 based on 40 critics. The IMDb page shows a Metascore of 99. Rotten Tomatoes, according to Wikipedia, lists a 98% approval rating from 135 reviews with an average of 9.3/10, and PostTrak audiences gave the film a 98% positive score.

IMDb's top spot and the user ratings

The IMDb "Most popular movies" chart, which IMDb describes as "determined by IMDb users," placed You Can See Everything at number one at the time of capture, ahead of Street Fighter at number two. The film's own IMDb page shows a user rating of 9.4 out of 10 from 7,500 ratings, a popularity rank of 1, 106 user reviews, 44 critic reviews and a count of 257,000 users who had added it to a watchlist. A news item on the same chart page, dated October 19, 2026, was headlined "Elizabeth Holmes Doc 'You Can See Everything' Debuts on IMDb With 9.4" rating.

There is an oddity in that capture. The IMDb page carries a "Coming soon" label and the line "Releases November 20, 2026," even while it lists more than $15.6 million in US and Canada takings. The details section explains it: November 20, 2026 is the release date for the United Kingdom. The page was evidently viewed from a European location (its display ads were priced in euros and written in German), and IMDb showed the local release date rather than the American one. According to Wikipedia, the film is scheduled for the UK and Ireland on November 20.

Letterboxd, the film diary site, showed an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 on the film's page, with the three reviews listed as most popular collecting 14,060, 11,091 and 8,257 likes respectively.

What the film shows

According to Wikipedia, the documentary runs 174 minutes and follows Holmes and her partner Billy Evans, who invited Fielder and Oppenheim to document them during the 34 days before Holmes began serving her sentence in 2023. Filming began at the couple's rented beach house in Del Mar, California. A24, according to Wikipedia, gave the directors permission to proceed without a deadline or any obligation to turn the footage into a finished film. The IMDb page carries the same detail in its trivia section.

Two years later, filming resumed. Actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the miniseries The Dropout, appears in the documentary both as herself and as Holmes in reenactments of conversations the crew was not permitted to film. Christopher Abbott portrays Evans in those scenes.

Several threads in the synopsis, as Wikipedia describes it, concern money and public image. Before filming, while Holmes was in another room, Evans requested a cut of the documentary's profit, and the filmmakers negotiated a profit-sharing agreement with him despite concerns about a conflict of interest. On-screen text, according to Wikipedia, states that Evans relinquished the agreement before release. The film also shows Evans erecting billboards featuring Holmes, impersonating her on X and authorizing the public release of an AI model resembling her. Shortly before her imprisonment, Holmes has her body 3D-scanned and expresses concern that her likeness could be misused, a worry that sits squarely within the right of publicity, the legal control a person holds over commercial use of their name and image.

Shultz's objection: "That was not the device"

Shultz appeared on CBS Mornings on October 19, a segment the CBS Mornings YouTube channel published the same day under the title "Theranos whistleblower says he nearly jumped out of his seat watching Elizabeth Holmes documentary." At the time of capture the video had 728,164 views and 673 comments.

He said the woman on screen bore little resemblance to the executive he had known. "The Elizabeth that I knew completely commanded a room," he said, describing rooms that held a secretary of state, a secretary of defense, generals and senators. The woman he saw on screen, according to Shultz, "looked frankly like a like a broken woman."

His sharpest criticism concerned one scene. Holmes, according to Shultz, brings out a Theranos device and lays its components across a table, and the conversation that follows turns on her claim that it was a device that "could" run any test. "They spend all this time relitigating the word could," he said. "What does could mean?"

"But my problem was that that was not the device that I worked with 12 hours a day," Shultz told CBS. "That was not the device that we hid from regulators. That was not the device that failed quality controls. That was not the device that we used to knowingly give patients incorrect medical information."

According to Shultz, the machine on the kitchen table "was a future version of Theranos 1.0 that was never completed and never used on patients." The device that was actually built and used, he said, "was far more rudimentary, wildly inaccurate, was not a standalone platform, could only test for one thing at a time." He also said the device was distinct from a new version that Holmes and Evans were "trying to brand as" Theranos 2.0. Wikipedia's synopsis of the film independently records that Holmes and Evans "continue contacting prospective investors about a new version of the device."

That part of the film was, in Shultz's words, "the most frustrating part." He said he "almost like jumped out of my seat to like scream at Nathan through the screen," and that his wife grabbed his arm. He had made a similar argument in writing. According to Wikipedia, Shultz published an op-ed in STAT on October 19, 2026, which praised the documentary's artistic merit but questioned what Fielder left out: the device Holmes showed was an incomplete prototype of a future product, not the "unimpressive and rudimentary" one that led to her imprisonment; she had been living at the $125 million Green Gables Estate during her trial; and she had refused to show audited financial statements to investors.

The revenue figure the captions garbled

Shultz used that last point to argue that Holmes knew she was lying. "If you actually believed the lies," he said, there would have been no need to build "this whole web of lies." He cited an SEC finding that Holmes had told prospective investors that the previous year's revenue was a certain sum "when in reality it was $100,000."

YouTube's automatic captions render the claimed figure as "$und00 million," which is unreadable. The Elizabeth Holmes article on Wikipedia, describing the SEC's March 2018 charges, states that the company "lied when it claimed to have a $100-million revenue stream in 2014. That year, the company made only $100,000." The figure Shultz cited is therefore most likely $100 million, but that reading comes from Wikipedia, not from the caption, and PPC Land has not verified it against the audio. The captions also misspell the company as "Theronos" throughout and Shultz's surname as "Schultz"; this article follows the spelling used on Wikipedia and in the CBS video title.

Harm to patients, as Shultz describes it

Asked by the host why he had been so certain in 2015, Shultz said that once he began working with the actual device, "it was so obvious that this thing could not do the things that Elizabeth was claiming." He then described what he said happened to patients: "We told people that they had HIV when they did not. We told people they had cancer when they did not. We told expecting mothers that they had lost their unborn child when they had not." He also said patients were told their potassium levels were dangerously high and, "upon retesting they were completely fine."

These are Shultz's own accounts. The criminal case did not convict Holmes on them. According to Wikipedia, the jury in January 2022 found Holmes guilty on four of seven counts related to defrauding investors and not guilty on four counts related to defrauding patients. The Theranos article on Wikipedia records related regulatory findings: a January 2016 letter from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said the company's Newark laboratory caused "immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety," and in May 2016 Theranos voided two years of results from its Edison device.

On sympathy for Holmes, Shultz conceded the point. "It's tough to not have sympathy for her," the host said, and Shultz agreed that watching her leave two young children was "very painful." He then cited a metaphor from the film about David Blaine pushing an ice pick through his hand: according to Shultz, Fielder uses it to suggest that "she is not playing a victim. She is an actual victim" of what Shultz called "an actual abusive relationship on screen." That reading is Shultz's interpretation of the film, not a finding.

The conviction, and how the sentence has changed

The CBS host described Holmes as "sentenced to more than 11 years after being convicted of defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars." The Wikipedia articles fill in the record.

According to Wikipedia, Judge Edward Davila sentenced Holmes in November 2022 to 11 years and 3 months (135 months) in federal prison and ordered her and former Theranos president Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani jointly to pay $452 million in restitution. Holmes reported to Federal Prison Camp, Bryan, in Texas on May 30, 2023. The Ninth Circuit affirmed her conviction and sentence in February 2025. In March 2026, Davila reduced the sentence by 12 months under revised federal sentencing guidelines. On September 22, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons approved her transfer to a halfway house in Del Valle, Texas, on August 23, 2027, against a scheduled release date of February 22, 2030. Wikipedia also reports, citing the Los Angeles Times, that Holmes began campaigning for a presidential pardon in December 2025.

The film's own Wikipedia article refers to "her eleven-year prison sentence," a rounding of the 11 years and 3 months given in the Holmes and Theranos articles.

Balwani, according to Wikipedia, was convicted on all 12 counts against him in July 2022 and sentenced to 12 years and 11 months.

Why a fraud documentary matters to marketers

The commercial story of You Can See Everything is a story about how attention was manufactured, and the Theranos record is substantially a story about claims made to investors, partners and patients.

The launch was built on scarcity. According to Wikipedia, the film premiered on September 6, 2026, as a secret screening at the 53rd Telluride Film Festival, where attendees did not know what they would see and were required to surrender their mobile devices. A24 released the teaser trailer the same day. The film was added to the New York Film Festival, where it screened on September 30, and it will close the Stockholm International Film Festival on November 26. In October 2026, Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions acquired distribution rights across Latin America, Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, India, South Korea, Southeast Asia and other territories. According to Wikipedia, it has also been nominated in five categories at the Critics' Choice Documentary Awards, scheduled for November 8.

A $15 million documentary opening lands at a moment when cinema is arguing for advertising budgets. PPC Land reported in September that the Video Advertising Bureau told marketers that 650 films outside the year's top 20 took $3.7 billion, or 43% of 2025 US box office, while domestic revenue of $8.7 billion remained about 24% below 2019. A three-hour documentary from an independent studio is exactly the kind of title that sits outside the top 20. It also opened against Whalefall, one of only two new narrative features in Disney's seven-film fall slate, and beat it. The scale is modest next to the blockbusters PPC Land has tracked this year, including Spider-Man: Brand New Day's $355 million domestic opening and the cinema and out-of-home push behind Spielberg's Disclosure Day, which Puck estimated needed $300 million to break even.

The CBS segment itself is a piece of distribution. CBS published it on YouTube, where its description links to the CBS News app and a free Paramount+ trial. PPC Land reported in October that, according to YouTube, people watched more than 35 billion hours of news on YouTube in 2025, over 12 billion of them on connected TVs. A broadcast morning-show interview reaching 728,164 views in under a day is part of that shift, with a broadcaster using a rival platform as a funnel back to its own connected TV and streaming products.

The older lesson is about claims. According to the Holmes article on Wikipedia, the SEC charged Holmes and Balwani in March 2018 with taking more than $700 million from investors "while advertising a false product," including a false claim that the technology was used by the Department of Defense in combat. In 2017, Theranos signed a consent decree with the Arizona Attorney General over alleged violations of the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act, including false advertisement, and agreed to refund $4.65 million to residents who had bought its tests. And according to the Theranos article, former employees of the reputation management firm Status Labs said Theranos had hired the firm to erase mentions of the Wall Street Journal's reporting from its Wikipedia page.

The "could" debate that so frustrated Shultz has an echo in marketing technology. PPC Land covered research in December 2025 on AI washing, defined as the "deliberate or negligent exaggeration of a system's artificial intelligence capabilities", and how inflated claims are followed by backlash once they collapse. Inflated revenue has its own advertising-industry precedent: in August 2025 federal prosecutors charged three executives over an alleged $25 million revenue fraud involving Near Intelligence and MobileFuse.

Then there is the response from those involved. According to Wikipedia, Evans said on the All-In podcast that he hoped the film would let viewers "see who [Holmes] is" independently of media coverage, said he had not seen it, and said participating may have been "the dumbest thing [he had] ever done." Fielder told Wired in October 2026 that Holmes called him shortly before release, expressing trust in him. John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose investigation helped expose the fraud, wrote in The New York Times that the filmmakers provided "a microscope with which to observe and dissect [Holmes's] lies," according to Wikipedia.

Whether the documentary rehabilitates Holmes or dissects her is the question critics and Shultz are now arguing over. The box office has already answered a different one: a film about a convicted founder, built around her own access and her own framing, can fill cinemas. Shultz's objection is that the framing is the problem. "That device is not the reason she went to prison," he told CBS.

Timeline

  • 2003 - Holmes founds Theranos, according to Wikipedia.
  • September 2013 - Theranos ends "stealth mode" with a Walgreens partnership for in-store blood collection.
  • 2013-2014 - Tyler Shultz works at Theranos.
  • October 2015 - The Wall Street Journal publishes John Carreyrou's investigation; Shultz is a key source.
  • January 2016 - CMS letter says the Newark lab caused "immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety."
  • May 2016 - Theranos voids two years of Edison test results.
  • April 2017 - Arizona consent decree; Theranos agrees to refund $4.65 million.
  • March 2018 - SEC charges Holmes and Balwani over more than $700 million raised from investors.
  • September 5, 2018 - Theranos begins formal dissolution.
  • January 3, 2022 - Jury convicts Holmes on four counts of defrauding investors; acquits on four patient-related counts.
  • July 2022 - Balwani convicted on all 12 counts.
  • November 2022 - Holmes sentenced to 11 years and 3 months and ordered, jointly with Balwani, to pay $452 million in restitution.
  • April 2023 - Filming begins in Del Mar, California, in the 34 days before Holmes's prison term.
  • May 30, 2023 - Holmes reports to Federal Prison Camp, Bryan.
  • February 2025 - Ninth Circuit affirms conviction and sentence.
  • August 7, 2025 - Prosecutors charge three advertising executives over an alleged $25 million revenue fraud.
  • December 2025 - Holmes begins campaigning for a presidential pardon, according to the Los Angeles Times as cited by Wikipedia.
  • December 22, 2025 - PPC Land covers research on AI washing in marketing.
  • March 2026 - Judge Davila reduces Holmes's sentence by 12 months.
  • June 2026 - Spielberg's Disclosure Day tests cinema and out-of-home advertising.
  • August 2026 - Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens to $355 million domestically.
  • September 3, 2026 - Disney lists a seven-film fall slate including Whalefall.
  • September 6, 2026 - You Can See Everything premieres as a secret screening at Telluride; A24 releases the teaser trailer.
  • September 16, 2026 - VAB tells marketers films outside the top 20 took 43% of 2025 box office.
  • September 22, 2026 - Bureau of Prisons approves Holmes's August 2027 halfway house transfer.
  • September 30, 2026 - The film screens at the New York Film Festival.
  • October 1, 2026 - YouTube says news viewing passed 35 billion hours in 2025.
  • October 16, 2026 - A24 releases the film in the US and Canada.
  • October 16-18, 2026 - Opening weekend: $15 million per CBS and Wikipedia, $15,601,418 per IMDb.
  • October 19, 2026 - Shultz appears on CBS Mornings and publishes an op-ed in STAT; IMDb lists the film at number one on its most popular movies chart.
  • November 8, 2026 - Critics' Choice Documentary Awards, with five nominations for the film.
  • November 20, 2026 - Scheduled UK and Ireland release.
  • November 26, 2026 - The film closes the Stockholm International Film Festival.
  • August 23, 2027 - Scheduled transfer of Holmes to a halfway house in Del Valle, Texas.
  • February 22, 2030 - Holmes's scheduled release date, according to the Bureau of Prisons letter cited by Wikipedia.

Summary

Who: Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted founder of Theranos, and her partner Billy Evans; directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim; distributor A24; and Tyler Shultz, the former Theranos employee who acted as a whistleblower in 2015.

What: You Can See Everything, a 174-minute documentary filmed in the weeks before Holmes entered prison, opened to $15 million in the US and Canada, the second-best documentary opening on record according to Wikipedia, with IMDb listing $15,601,418. Shultz told CBS Mornings that the Theranos device Holmes displays in the film was an unfinished future version never used on patients, not the device behind her conviction.

When: The film opened on October 16, 2026, with its first weekend running October 16-18. Shultz's CBS Mornings interview and STAT op-ed were published on October 19, 2026.

Where: Cinemas in the United States and Canada, with releases in the UK and Ireland scheduled for November 20; the interview aired on CBS and was posted to the CBS Mornings YouTube channel.

Why: The film's opening shows that a documentary from an independent studio can draw cinema audiences at a time when the industry is pitching itself to advertisers, while Shultz's objection raises the question of whether the film's access to Holmes allows her to reframe the capability claims at the center of the Theranos fraud.