Clayface box office battle: documentary threatens DC's top spot

Warner Bros. expected DC's Clayface to walk away with the pre-Halloween weekend. A three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes had other plans. A24's You Can See Everything has turned into the most unlikely box office story of the fall, and the Clayface box office battle now looks like a genuine two-way race for the top spot, according to TheWrap.

The numbers explain the surprise. You Can See Everything opened to $15.8 million from just 855 theaters, the biggest documentary opening in twenty-two years. It added $2.6 million on Tuesday alone, lifting its total to $20.8 million. This weekend it expands to about 2,600 theaters nationwide, and TheWrap expects a second weekend of at least $18 million.

That would make it the first documentary since 2018 to cross the thirty-million mark by the end of a second weekend. Audience enthusiasm shows no sign of cooling. PostTrak surveys found 92% of viewers gave the film its highest rating, definite recommend, a score usually reserved for faith-based hits. More than two thousand screenings have sold out, the studio said.

You Can See Everything is directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim and looks inside the private life of Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos founder convicted of fraud after her blood-testing startup collapsed. CBC News described the film as taking the world by storm, and the rollout backs that up. The documentary earned more in a few days than most nonfiction films manage in a full run, and it did so while asking audiences to sit through three hours of deliberately uncomfortable material.

Why the Clayface box office race is this close

Clayface is no slouch on paper. The R-rated body horror film, directed by James Watkins from a script by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, stars Tom Rhys Harries as disfigured actor Matt Hagen alongside Naomi Ackie. Warner Bros. is projecting a $25 million to $30 million domestic opening from more than thirty-four hundred theaters, plus about twenty million internationally, for a worldwide opening north of forty-five million dollars.

Reviews are on its side. Clayface sits at 76% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Thursday previews brought in $3.5 million, ahead of the pace of recent comic book misfires. Word of mouth matters more than usual for horror, which tends to open fast and fade fast, so a strong Friday could still settle the weekend in its favor. Horror crowds also tend to buy tickets late, which leaves room for the tracking to be wrong in either direction.

The Borat comparison

The closest precedent is Borat. Sacha Baron Cohen's mockumentary opened to $26.8 million from 837 screens in 2006, expanded wide, and finished with $128.5 million domestically. You Can See Everything is the largest opening from fewer than one thousand screens since that film. Nobody expects a documentary to repeat that exact run, but the trajectory rhymes.

What is at stake for Warner Bros.

Clayface is the first Warner Bros. film released under Skydance ownership, with a production budget of $40 million, a fraction of recent studio misfires such as Supergirl. It mainly needs to perform like a solid mid-budget horror release to count as a win. It also has to dodge comparisons to Sony's villain-led flops, even as supporters point to Joker, the first billion-dollar R-rated hit, as proof that DC's darker corners can pay off. The rest of the weekend is crowded too. Laika's stop-motion film Wildwood, which took years to make on a budget north of one hundred million dollars, is expected to open in the single digits despite a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, and Black Bear's Wicker is playing in the mid-single digits. Either way, a documentary stealing the weekend would be the stranger headline, and the stranger headlines keep winning lately.

The race will be decided by Sunday. Analysts tracked the two films closely all week, and TheWrap's weekend preview and The States Journal's breakdown both put them within striking distance. The studio bet that curiosity about Holmes could fill theaters for three hours, and so far the gamble is paying. This weekend finds out whether curiosity beats a comic book monster.