Cookie Queens Becomes the Year's Highest-Grossing Non-Celebrity Documentary
Cookie Queens has become the highest-grossing non-celebrity documentary of the year, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film follows four young girls as they try to reach their sales goals during Girl Scout cookie season.
The film's route to audiences started on the festival circuit. It premiered at Sundance, where a premiere is a film's first public screening, and later won the audience award at SXSW. Festival audience awards are voted on by the people in the seats, not by a jury.
Director Alysa Nahmias brought the film to the SCAD Savannah Film Festival in late October. It screened in the Docs to Watch sidebar, a separate programme of new documentaries that runs alongside the main lineup. Nahmias was one of 10 directors of outstanding 2026 documentaries who took part in the festival's Docs to Watch panel. She spoke about the film with The Hollywood Reporter during the event.
Savannah has a particular link to the subject. Girl Scouts was founded there in 1912. Nahmias has directed and produced documentaries for 20 years, but she was never a Girl Scout herself. She met with Girl Scouts of the USA while making the film, but she made it independently of the organisation.
The filmmaking process was long. Nahmias first filmed seven girls over a six-month stretch. The finished film centres on four of them: Olive, Nikki, Shannon Elizabeth and Ara. The four did not meet one another until after the film was locked, the point at which the edit is complete.
That approach shaped how the story is told. Nahmias shot the film from the children's points of view, so viewers see the season through the girls' eyes rather than from the adults selling alongside them.
For anyone who has ever bought a box of cookies at a school gate, the film offers a look at the sales drive from the other side of the table. The festival run, the audience awards and now the box-office total show a documentary built around children finding its way to a wide audience.
