Addie Morfoot previously led Variety’s Docs vertical and has reported on the doc industry from Sundance, IDFA and CPH:Dox. She also writes for the New York Times.
The buzziest documentary out of the fall festival season is Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything, about Elizabeth Holmes’ final days before reporting to prison. It runs nearly three hours and opens in New York and Los Angeles on Oct. 16. That was also the date Alex Gibney’s HBO doc Musk was originally scheduled to hit theaters, but that release was recently pushed up a week, to Oct. 9.
Gibney’s theatrical distributor, Bleecker Street, said the change was “due to demand.” But the consensus among people who have seen both docs is that Musk can’t compete with Fielder and Holmes’ awkward encounters in You Can See Everything.
Fielder and Oppenheim’s movie runs 174 minutes and has what every reality show needs — a mentally unstable, unreliable star. As Fielder tries to make sense of his interactions with Holmes, he goes so far as to re-create conversations using a well-known actor to play the convicted fraudster. The film was financed by A24 — a studio that shut down its documentary division in 2025.
In other words, the most talked-about nonfiction film of the year isn’t entirely nonfiction, and it came from a company that had already decided nonfiction wasn’t a business.
Gibney made his own Holmes documentary in 2019. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley was a straight investigative account of the entrepreneur’s corporate fraud; HBO bought it and put money behind it. Seven years later, the version everyone is talking about is a put-on.
2 Million Viewers or Bust
Documentaries that expose systemic failures, challenge prevailing perspectives or seek to change the world are becoming an endangered species, harder to make and harder still to see.
The shift started before politics entered the picture. Around 2022, the streamers and broadcasters that had built their libraries on the backs of documentary filmmakers started letting the algorithm and audience data do the picking, and the algorithm didn’t want social justice. It wanted scandal-driven nonfiction — true crime, celebrity, sports — and the buyers followed.
The math became brutal. Netflix has to be confident a documentary will reach somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million viewers before it makes sense for the streamer to carry it — a threshold most independently financed films never approach. Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings laid out that math to Geralyn White Dreyfous, co-founder of the documentary fund Impact Partners (The Cove, Icarus, Navalny). She recounted the conversation at the 2025 CPH:Summit in Copenhagen. The company’s business had outgrown the scale of much independent nonfiction, Hastings explained to her, and it could absorb only about 20 percent of what a fund like hers produced. Netflix declined to comment, and a rep for Hastings didn’t respond to a request for comment.
When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, a genre that had already become a bad commercial bet became a professional risk. Twenty months later, the fall festival market shows no sign of that easing.
Ahead: why Sheila Nevins believes some documentaries are simply “over”; why Josh Braun calls the market “Darwinian”; why Sam Pollard refuses to “go the murder route”; how a rave-reviewed E. Jean Carroll film got zero offers while Amazon spent $75 million on Melania; and why one of nonfiction’s biggest names says the business has never offered more opportunity.
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