The Year's Biggest Documentary Started With the Right to Deliver Nothing

You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, opened through A24 on October 16 and took in just over $15 million on 855 screens. Its second weekend it made $19.5 million on 2,655, which, the A.V. Club reported, already put it past Becoming Led Zeppelin as the top-grossing documentary of the year. The same piece called it box-office history at an extraordinarily tough time for documentaries, and the distributor is part of that story: in May 2025 A24 shut down its own documentary division, with an insider telling TheWrap that "the market has become too challenging to support an entire division." The tempting takeaway is that theatrical nonfiction is back. One film is not a market, and I would not build a slate on it.

The part worth stealing is in the deal. Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, had asked A24 whether it wanted a documentary about her last days before she reported to prison, and Fielder and Oppenheim came in with 34 days left on that clock. Before filming, Fielder told A24, in an interview with Wired quoted by Variety, that "we need the ability to deliver nothing to you guys if it doesn't work out." Oppenheim has described it as a provision "that we could just kill it at any time." A24 agreed. TheWrap's account puts it the same way from the studio's side: resources to film Holmes and Evans "regardless of whether or not a film actually came out of it."

That clause matters most for a reason that has nothing to do with box office. This was a film the subject asked for. When the person on camera starts the project, every pressure in the room runs toward making the film they had in mind, because that is the film whose access you are spending. A team obliged to deliver has to manage that pressure. A team that can walk away only has to keep looking. Fielder said as much: "It really meant I didn't have to hold back with her or with them." And the pressure did arrive. After a Los Angeles screening, the Daily Beast reported, Fielder said Evans "started trying to exert a level of control over the process that made it very hard to engage with him." Editorial independence is usually described as a temperament. Here it was a line in a contract, written before anyone needed it.

I owe readers a reconciliation, because in September I argued on this site that a hard deadline is what finishes a film, and a kill switch looks like the opposite clause. I don't think it is. Both take a decision out of the moment, when you are tired and invested and embarrassed, and put it in the paperwork, when you are clear-headed. A deadline decides in advance when you stop. A kill switch decides in advance that stopping with nothing is an acceptable result. What both get rid of is the soft middle, where a project keeps going because quitting looks like failure and continuing always looks like diligence. John Johnson Reporting got finished because it had to be delivered. This film got made honestly, by its directors' account, because it did not have to be.

I should be plain about who gets a deal like this. Fielder arrived with a track record and a studio willing to fund a maybe, and Holmes's prison date gave the whole thing a natural end. Most documentary work is commissioned as a promise to deliver a film. But the principle scales down. Ask for a funded, bounded first phase with a written no-film exit before you start shooting, even if it is only a few weeks. And when a subject brings you their own story, tell them at the start that you may not make the film they want, or any film at all, and mean it. The box-office numbers will be someone else's story next fall. That sentence is the part of this one you can reuse.