A nearly three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes was the No. 1 movie in America over Halloween weekend. That’s a triumph for A24, and a scary harbinger for theaters heading into a thin November that faces competition from an entirely different corner of entertainment.
A24’s You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, took in $11.4 million in its third weekend, narrowly edging DC Studios’ Clayface, according to Monday’s final figures reported by Variety. It had finished second in each of its first two weekends, behind Street Fighter and then Clayface. Its domestic total now stands at $64.7 million.
It is the first documentary outside the concert genre to top the box office since Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. But its lack of direct competition is telling. No studio opened a wide release, and overall ticket sales came to about $56 million, down more than 40% from the prior weekend and the second-lowest total of the year, according to studio estimates.
Why Halloween weekends sink the box office
Unlike Christmas, Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, Halloween doesn’t boost the box office when it lands on a weekend. People don’t get an extra day off, and they’re more likely to spend peak moviegoing hours trick-or-treating or at parties.
The last Saturday Halloween, in 2020, came while most theaters were shuttered. The one before that, in 2015, was the weakest weekend of that year to that point: three new wide releases flopped, and The Martian stayed on top in its fifth week, as Fortune reported.
A thin November slate
This year’s quiet Halloween also foreshadows a challenging month. The biggest swing is Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping on Nov. 20, the sixth film in the franchise and an adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ 2025 bestseller. Boxoffice Pro’s long-range tracking puts its opening at $55 million to $65 million; the last installment, 2023’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, opened to $44.6 million.
Thanksgiving week brings Disney’s animated Hexed and Universal’s Focker In-Law, both on Nov. 25. Focker In-Law is a greater gamble: the fourth film in the franchise that began with 2000’s Meet the Parents arrives 16 years after Little Fockers, which opened to $30.8 million in 2010.
Warner Bros.’ animated The Cat in the Hat and Searchlight’s Wild Horse Nine open Nov. 6, and smaller titles like Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol and I Play Rocky are sprinkled through the month. But the box office’s most likely competition comes from the video game business: Rockstar Games releases Grand Theft Auto VI on Nov. 19, one day before Sunrise on the Reaping opens.
The month’s biggest launch isn’t a movie
The sixth game in the series arrives 13 years after Grand Theft Auto V, and anticipation has been building for years. Rockstar confirmed development in February 2022; that September, a hack leaked roughly 90 clips of early footage, and in December 2023 the first trailer leaked hours before its scheduled debut. The game promises a more expansive setting than any previous Grand Theft Auto title.
Grand Theft Auto V generated $800 million in sales in its first 24 hours in 2013 and passed $1 billion in three days, which publisher Take-Two Interactive called the fastest any entertainment property had reached that mark. It has since sold more than 230 million units, according to Take-Two’s August 2026 earnings report.
GTA VI is poised to beat those numbers. Analytics firm Sensor Tower estimates it had drawn 6.45 million digital pre-orders worth about $630 million as of Oct. 20, excluding physical copies. That global, pre-launch haul already tops the roughly $625 million domestic run of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the year’s second-highest-grossing film behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
It is also more than 11 times what every movie in North American theaters grossed over Halloween weekend. For Take-Two, which reported $6.66 billion in revenue in its fiscal year ended in March, the launch underpins a forecast of $8 billion to $8.2 billion in net bookings this fiscal year.
Video games may draw a narrower audience than theatrical films, but a release this size is bound to occupy the attention of millions later this month. That’s likely to pull some of them away from the big screen for at least a weekend, leaving a notable dent in the fall box office.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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