The Dropout finds a second audience after secret Holmes film emerges

A four-year-old drama about Elizabeth Holmes is finding a new audience because of a film nobody knew existed.

That drama is The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu limited series — meaning a story told in one season with a planned ending — in which Amanda Seyfried plays Holmes. Viewing rose 186% in September compared with August, after the 6 September announcement that a documentary about Holmes had been made in secret, according to Variety.

The numbers show a sharp restart. In August, The Dropout was watched for 420,000 hours, or roughly 62,000 full runs of the series based on its nearly seven-hour runtime. In September, that grew to 1.2 million hours, or about 176,000 estimated views. The lift has continued into October.

During the week of 12 October alone, the series drew 62,000 views. That one week matched its entire August total. Viewing that week was up 92% on the week before. For October to date, the series has reached 997,000 hours watched, or 148,000 views, bringing the total since September to 2.2 million hours or 296,000 estimated views.

The trigger is You Can See Everything, an A24 documentary about Holmes directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. Its existence had not been made public before it appeared as a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival. It then went into wide release on 16 October.

A24 describes the documentary as following Holmes after she invites a sceptical film crew to record her every move 34 days before she was sent to prison, according to the studio’s film page. Hulu describes The Dropout as its limited series telling the story of Holmes and Theranos, the blood-testing start-up she founded after dropping out of Stanford, according to programme listings from Hulu and Hulu.

The series was created by Elizabeth Meriwether. Seyfried won the Emmy for lead actress in a limited series for the role.

For viewers, this means an old programme is behaving like a new release. The Holmes story is circulating again in several forms at once. Journalist John Carreyrou has returned to the New York Times bestseller list with his 2018 book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Forbes separately reported that The Dropout logged more than 36.6 million minutes viewed in September, the month the documentary was announced.