Nathan Fielder's Elizabeth Holmes Doc Becomes a Box Office Giant

Read the episode (Narration script)

Coming up on Spotlight: a three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is now one of the biggest documentaries ever, Link is being launched into the sky by speedrunners, and it turns out The Edge from U2 wrote a sequel to Elf.

Start with the unlikeliest hit of the fall. You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, has now made almost eighty million dollars in North America. IndieWire reports that passes Everything Everywhere All at Once to become A24's third-biggest release here, and it moves past March of the Penguins. Leaving out music films, only Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has done better. It cost about seven million dollars. It even finished first at the box office over Halloween weekend.

Then on Sunday night it swept the Critics Choice Documentary Awards, winning every category it was nominated in, including best documentary, best director, editing, score and cinematography.

If you know Fielder from Nathan for You or The Rehearsal, you can guess this isn't a straight portrait. The film follows Holmes in her last days before reporting to prison, and Fielder is on screen the whole time, the expert in staged reality trying to read someone who may be performing too. TheWrap's William Bibbiani says the filmmakers "come to the conclusion that they can come to no conclusions," and then turn that failure into the subject, comparing it to Orson Welles's F for Fake. Along the way, Holmes watches The Dropout, the Hulu series in which Amanda Seyfried played her, about as strange a viewing party as you could arrange. It runs nearly three hours, and audiences keep showing up anyway. Saturday Night Live noticed: Druski's episode included a parody called Dru Can See Everything.

One more documentary this week, and this one you can watch from the couch. Ron Howard's Avedon, about the photographer Richard Avedon, arrives on Netflix Wednesday, and Variety's Owen Gleiberman calls it the best documentary Howard has made. The origin story alone is worth it. At nineteen, in the Merchant Marine, Avedon shot something like a hundred thousand ID photos against a plain white background, and noticed how much a bare backdrop revealed a face. That white paper became his signature, behind Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Twiggy, Oklahoma oil workers and some sixteen thousand sittings over sixty years.

Gamers, Ocarina of Time on Switch 2 has been out four days, and speedrunners are already breaking it. IGN rounded up the early discoveries. Physics quirks can fling Link into the air like a firework. Standing on a treasure chest and making a few sudden moves sends him straight up to the ceiling. One glitch gets adult Link into a cutscene meant for his younger self, and the game crams the grown-up into the kid's body, which looks exactly as cursed as it sounds. And despite the remake's new sprint button, the fastest way around Hyrule still appears to be rolling. One early full run came in just under four and a half hours, for a game that takes most people around twenty.

The Strokes were Druski's musical guests on SNL, their fifth time on the show and their first without guitarist Nick Valensi, who's been on a break. Walton Goggins came out to play bongos on Going Shopping, just as he does in the video. Then the band released a new video for Lonely in the Future, directed by Warren Fu and starring puppets from Spitting Image, the British satire factory behind Genesis's Land of Confusion video forty years ago. The cast includes the band, Lou Reed, Stanley Kubrick, Elon Musk, Rick Rubin and the YouTube critic Anthony Fantano, who gets a dig in the lyrics.

Halloween did something remarkable for Michael Jackson. Billboard says Thriller jumped from thirteen to number two on the albums chart, its highest spot since April 1984, the last of its thirty-seven weeks at number one. Spooky-season streams helped, but so did new vinyl, including a liquid-filled edition. Nineteen thousand vinyl copies in one week, Thriller's biggest vinyl week since electronic sales tracking began in 1991. Olivia Rodrigo stays on top for a fourth week.

For anime fans looking for something gentler than spies and monsters, Hirayasumi is coming to Netflix internationally in January. It follows Hiroto, a cheerful twenty-nine-year-old with no full-time job and no plan, who inherits a house from the grouchy old woman down the street and ends up sharing it with his teenage cousin, an art student. Gen Hoshino sings the opening theme.

Finally, a holiday mystery. Andy Richter, who had a small part in Elf and just co-wrote a book about the movie, told the Daily Beast's Obsessed podcast that a producer was once approached about an Elf sequel, written by The Edge. Yes, the U2 guitarist. Richter says it was fully written. Nobody seems to know what it's about, or why it never happened.

That's Spotlight for Monday. Avedon lands on Netflix Wednesday, and if you've got three hours and a high tolerance for uncertainty, Elizabeth Holmes is waiting. See you tomorrow.