'Clayface' Is Losing Halloween Weekend to a Three-Hour Elizabeth Holmes Documentary

Halloween weekend is the one frame on the calendar that belongs to horror. Warner Bros. and DC brought a melting-face body-horror movie with a comic-book logo on it. And on Friday, the movie that beat it was a three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

A24's You Can See Everything — Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's film about the Theranos founder — topped the Friday chart, according to Variety's Friday figures, with $3.56 million from 3,243 theaters, in its third week of release. Clayface, in its second weekend, took $3.3 million from 3,478 theaters. Deadline's Saturday-morning report, built on rival-studio estimates, has both films finishing the weekend just above $10 million — the documentary at roughly $10.65 million for the frame, Clayface at roughly $10.25 million — which means the No. 1 spot for Halloween weekend is a fight the DC film was supposed to watch from the couch.

The documentary that won't sit down

You Can See Everything is not a normal documentary run. Fielder and Oppenheim developed it quietly for more than three years. MovieWeb reported that Holmes approached A24 about the film herself before she reported to federal prison in 2023 for defrauding Theranos investors. It opened October 16 to $15.6 million — the biggest documentary debut since 2013. Then it did the thing documentaries are not supposed to do: its second weekend got bigger, roughly $19.5 million as it expanded from 855 theaters to about 2,600. By the end of this weekend its domestic total will sit near $67.5 million, and A24 — which is in the middle of crossing half a billion dollars at the domestic box office this year, the biggest year in the company's history — Deadline reports the studio plans to submit it across Oscar categories, Best Picture and Director included.

Clayface is not a flop. That's what makes this interesting.

Strip the headline away and Clayface is doing its job. James Watkins directed it, from a story and screenplay by Mike Flanagan, with Tom Rhys Harries as Matt Hagen — a rising actor who volunteers for an experimental procedure after a disfiguring accident. It cost a reported $40–44 million, a fraction of the reported $170 million behind DC's Supergirl. The documentary, by contrast, was made for a reported $7 million — MovieWeb noted A24 cleared profitability on it almost immediately. It opened at No. 1 last weekend with $24 million, Deadline reported it carries an A- CinemaScore that horror films almost never get, with PostTrak audiences at 4½ stars, 85% positive and 68% definite-recommend. As an experiment — R-rated, mid-budget, director-driven DC — it works.

It's just sharing its moment with a phenomenon. A three-hour documentary about a fraud trial is out-drawing a superhero on the superhero's best weekend, in more weeks and with fewer theaters, because audiences keep telling other audiences to go. That is the story of the fall box office in one sentence: the event movie of the season is the one nobody budgeted like one.

MovieWeb, reporting Friday night, framed the weekend the same way: the film positioned to lead the Halloween box office is not a horror holdover or a superhero release. Sunday's estimates settle who actually takes Halloween weekend — the Friday scoreboard says the documentary, the weekend projection says it's within a rounding error. Either way, Clayface now knows what every DC villain learns eventually. The scariest thing in Gotham was never the mud. It's the competition.