Noah Elgart was under the impression that the new documentary “You Can See Everything” would do well at the box office. When you’re the general manager of a movie theater — in this case, Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill Cinemas — for more than a decade, you start to develop a feel for this sort of thing.
What Elgart could not have predicted is simply how well, the movie would work. In the second week of its theatrical release, weekend and weeknight screenings of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s bizarre Elizabeth Holmes film, for which they secretly spent time with the fraudulent businesswoman in the weeks before her prison sentence, continued to sell out in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Elgart said some of his auditoriums in Cobble Hill have even reached capacity on weekday afternoons.
The film’s distributor, A24, said demand for tickets was particularly high in New York, where more than a thousand screenings have been sold since the film’s October 16 release.
“It’s very rare,” Elgart said. “I don’t know when the last time I saw a midweek 2 p.m. show sell out in advance.”
It looks like if you want to see the film in Manhattan or Brooklyn anytime soon, you’ll have to settle for the front row. Or you can venture out of these boroughs and look to the Bronx, Queens, or Staten Island. A visit to Fandango Monday afternoon revealed that only 14 of the nearly 200 seats had been purchased for a 6 p.m. screening that same evening at the Alamo Drafthouse in Staten Island. There were plenty of decent seats left. By comparison, every seat — except for one at the very end of the first row, arguably the worst seat in the house — had been purchased for a showing of comparable length and size at Regal Essex Crossing on the Lower East Side.
The film, produced over a three-year period for approximately $7 million, grossed $15 million in its opening weekend. By the end of its second weekend in theaters, it had grossed over $45 million in total. A24 estimates that about 70 percent of its audience is under 35, which may explain its popularity in some Brooklyn neighborhoods.
More than 3,000 showings were sold on the opening weekend itself, according to A24. Most of them were in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ryan Noonan, senior vice president of public relations at AMC Theaters, also named New York and Los Angeles as AMC markets with a “great response to the film.” In response, theaters added more showtimes.
This is not to say that it has become easier to see “You can see everything” in certain parts of the city. Josh Ben-Ami, a 31-year-old digital marketing executive living in Manhattan, said he and his partner probably visit AMC Lincoln Square 13 “several times a month.” As a member of the AMC Stubs A-List, a popular awards program, he’s usually pretty good at seeing trendy movies early on. But he won’t be able to see this one until next Sunday, the third weekend of its theatrical run.
Ben-Ami likened the experience to trying to see “The Odyssey” in 70mm IMAX, a long, winding journey that couldn’t be more different from the one Fielder embarks on.
“It had been hyped since last year. It was a big Christopher Nolan film, so I understand why the demand was so great,” he said. “I don’t think I ever imagined or anticipated that ‘You Can See Everything’ would be the next ‘Odyssey’ in that regard.”
Elgart, general manager of Cobble Hill Cinemas, noted that the length of the documentary also helps explain all the crowded theaters. “You Can See It All” is two hours and 54 minutes long, meaning movie programmers are forced to schedule fewer screening times than they might have for a 90-minute or two-hour film.
“The movie business is about giving people what they want, and if people are clamoring for this movie and there are no seats to see it, you have to meet their needs,” Elgart said.
That said, it’s also “very difficult because you have relationships with studios and you want to play everyone’s movies, and you also want to have a diverse audience that likes all types of movies,” he said.
David Montague, a 29-year-old resident of Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, was looking forward to watching “You Can See Everything” at the Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Brooklyn so he could go with a friend who lives nearby. He bought tickets as soon as they were available. But then he received a notification that he had been taken off the waitlist for another of the city’s hottest tickets — Harry Styles at Madison Square Garden — and knew he couldn’t pass up this one.
By the time Montague and his friend tried to buy new movie tickets, he said, they were sold out “from Harlem all the way to downtown Brooklyn.” Strangers on the subway recommended he go to the AMC Garden State Plaza 16 in Paramus, New Jersey, which took him by surprise.
“It’s crazy because people from New Jersey are going to town to see a show like it’s nothing,” he said. “But it’s rare that people from the city come to Jersey to see anything.”
To see “Everything”, you may have to travel.
Gn entert
