Nathan Fielder is a bigger draw than DC now — and Halloween proved it

The Halloween box office came down to a photo finish, and the documentary won. A24's You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's nearly three-hour film about Elizabeth Holmes, took the October 30–November 1 weekend with $10.6 million, about $200,000 ahead of Clayface in the DC movie's second frame.

The trend lines matter more than the margin. Clayface dropped 57 percent; the documentary slid about 45, from $19.5 million to $10.6 million, in its third weekend. One of these films is holding its audience, and it's not the one with a Batman villain in it.

The holiday itself delivered the sharper verdict. DC had an actual monster movie in theaters on Halloween, and this is what people on r/boxoffice were reporting from their parties:

"Saw someone wore a Nathan Fielder costume at a Halloween party I went to last night."

— a moviegoer on r/boxoffice

The numbers nobody saw coming

You Can See Everything has been breaking the documentary business model for three straight weekends, and Rotten Tomatoes' box-office desk has been keeping the list of firsts:

• Opening: $15.6 million from just 855 theaters — the first non-concert documentary to top the box office since Fahrenheit 9/11 in June 2004.
• Weekend two: $19.5 million from 2,655 theaters, up roughly 25 percent from its debut. Films almost never grow in weekend two.
• Weekend three: $10.6 million and No. 1 again — the first documentary ever to lead its third weekend.
• Total: $63.8 million domestic in 17 days, on a reported $7 million budget, at 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Scale: only the fourth documentary ever to play in over 3,000 theaters. The other three starred Michael Jackson and Taylor Swift.

That total already makes it the highest-grossing domestic documentary in 15 years. Next on the list is Michael Jackson's This Is It at $72.1 million domestic, and at the current pace the Holmes film passes it within a week — which would put it fifth on the all-time documentary chart, behind only The Eras Tour, Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins and Justin Bieber's Never Say Never.

On Halloween weekend, the event movie in American theaters was a documentary about a blood-testing fraud.

What it says about the event movie

The sentence that keeps coming up in the box-office threads is some version of disbelief. A three-hour documentary outgrossing a Laika film, a Street Fighter movie, and the DCU in the same month reads like a glitch, and one commenter asked flatly: "How is that possible?"

Don't miss: I wrote Clayface off as DC's Morbius too. Its international numbers say I was wrong

It's possible because the film became the thing people need to have seen to be in the conversation — the same person who spotted the Fielder costume described coworkers who barely go to the movies asking about it at work dinners. Clayface sells a universe, and universes have been underdelivering all year: Supergirl lost its studio a reported $125 million, and Clayface is headed for a $60–70 million domestic finish. Fielder is selling one unrepeatable film, and three weekends of holds say the conversation is worth more than the canon right now.

Previously we wrote: Elle Woods would never: Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine layoffs land weeks before the holidays