The most efficient movie in American theaters right now is not a comic book film or a franchise sequel. It is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder, and it is making its money the old fashioned way: a small number of screens, each one packed. The per screen numbers behind the A24 release You Can See Everything explain why Hollywood keeps falling in love with the small bet.

The opening that turned heads

You Can See Everything, the A24 documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, opened over the weekend of October 16 to 18 with about $15 million from just 855 theaters, according to studio estimates reported by Box Office Mojo and trade trackers. That works out to roughly $17,500 per screen, a figure most wide releases never touch.

Then the film did the rarest thing in modern box office: it grew. In its second weekend, October 23 to 25, A24 expanded the documentary to 2,655 theaters and it earned $19.5 million, a bigger weekend than its first, according to the Screendollars weekend report with data courtesy of Rentrak. Its running domestic total reached about $45.1 million in ten days.

The other side of the ledger

On the same opening weekend, Whalefall, a survival thriller from Disney and 20th Century Studios in which a diver is swallowed by a sperm whale, opened with about $8 million from 3,065 theaters. That is roughly $2,600 per screen, and the film carried a reported production budget of $60 million. The documentary played in about a quarter as many theaters and earned nearly twice the money.

Why the per screen number rules the business

Studios do not keep the full box office gross. Theaters keep a share of every ticket, commonly around half on a domestic run, which is why trade coverage of the number one film that following weekend, Warner Bros. release Clayface, was careful to note that its estimated $43 million worldwide opening against a reported $44 million production budget was not a break even result. A film is not paid for when its gross matches its budget. It is paid for when the studio share of the gross, after the theater cut and the marketing spend, covers the cost.

That math is exactly why a documentary like You Can See Everything is such a powerful business story. A modest production cost, a small marketing spend, packed screens and word of mouth doing the advertising for free. The same weekend reports put the year to date domestic box office at about $8.2 billion, up roughly 20 percent on 2025, and the films punching above their weight this fall are the ones built on the small bet, not the giant one.

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