Long Documentaries Are Pulling Crowds Into US Cinemas, Says Amsterdam Festival Chief

A documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has passed $80 million at the box office, making it the third-biggest domestic release for the distributor A24, Variety reported on 12 November 2026. "Domestic" means the United States and Canada.

The film is You Can See Everything, made by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder. It runs just under three hours. Isabel Arrate Fernandez, artistic director of IDFA, the Amsterdam documentary festival, spoke about its success in the same interview.

"What we are seeing happen at the box office in the U.S. is a buzz," she said. She hopes that buzz will encourage people to think differently about what a documentary can do when it is shared with a full room of strangers in a cinema.

Length is not putting people off, she said. You Can See Everything and Alex Gibney's Musk, which runs past four hours, are both drawing audiences into cinemas despite their long running times. Fernandez also said Fielder's name brought a new group of viewers to the cinema for the Holmes film, people who might not usually buy a ticket for a documentary.

She was careful about what the two films prove. She called them "exceptions," because both are US productions with bigger publicity and marketing budgets than most documentaries get. Even so, she argued they show that documentaries in cinemas can thrive.

"These films break every pattern that there has been, every framework people were holding onto," she said.

For independent documentary makers, she said, the path forward means stepping outside the fixed way documentaries have usually been released. Cinemas, streaming services and festivals each have their own habits, and she suggested those habits may need rethinking if smaller films are to find audiences.

What makes this stand out is the mix of ingredients. A subject from the business world, a director known for comedy and television, and a running time that would once have sent many distributors reaching for a shorter cut. Fernandez did not say whether other studios or distributors will follow that path.

A film about a fraud case, several hours long, has found a paying crowd in the US, and the festival chief who programs documentaries for a living is paying close attention.