Viewership of Hulu’s “The Dropout” jumped 186% in September as anticipation built for “You Can See Everything,” the secretly produced Elizabeth Holmes documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, Variety reported.
The surge began Sept. 6, when A24 revealed the film existed. “The Dropout,” the 2022 limited series in which Amanda Seyfried plays the Theranos founder, drew 1.2 million hours in September after logging 420,000 in August. The week of Oct. 12 added 422,000 hours, a 92% increase over the previous week and as much as the whole of August in seven days. Since September, the series has accumulated 2.2 million hours, roughly 296,000 estimated views.
Luminate, a firm that tracks streaming, measured a similar climb. It counted 36.6 million minutes watched in September, a 220% rise from August’s 11.3 million. Nearly 2.8 million of those minutes came on Sept. 9, days after the film’s first trailer appeared.
The documentary’s theatrical run fuels the momentum. It opened Oct. 16 on 855 screens and took in an estimated $15 million, second to “Street Fighter” with $31 million. Outside concert films, no documentary has opened bigger in over two decades. Only “Fahrenheit 9/11,” at $23.9 million in 2004, ranks higher. A24 reported over 2,000 sold-out showings, and over 70% of the audience was under 35. The film expands nationwide this weekend.
The Holmes revival reaches beyond streaming. John Carreyrou’s “Bad Blood,” the 2018 book that exposed the fraud, has returned to the New York Times bestseller list. JustWatch reported that search interest in “The Dropout” rose 200% week over week.
Fielder and Oppenheim spent years on the project in secret, filming Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, in the weeks before she entered prison in 2023 to serve an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors. The film cost under $7 million to make and under $10 million to market, and it holds a 99 on Metacritic.
The percentages carry a caveat. August’s baseline was small, about 62,000 estimated views, so even a tripling leaves “The Dropout” well short of a streaming hit. Variety derives its view counts by dividing hours watched by the series’ runtime, which makes them approximations.
