Paramount’s 119-Minute Action Hit Officially Loses Box Office Crown To The Highest-Rated Movie in History

Video game movies have gotten much better at opening big, but staying power is still a separate test, and Street Fighter may be running into that distinction already. Paramount’s new take on the Capcom franchise opened on Oct. 16 with a lot working in its favor: a large ensemble led by Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo, bigger-name supporting turns from Jason Momoa, David Dastmalchian and 50 Cent, plus crossover appeal from WWE stars Cody Rhodes and Roman Reigns.

Its $31 million domestic debut and $51.1 million global launch were enough for first place, and the biggest opening a Street Fighter movie has posted to date, even if that still came in below Mortal Kombat II’s $38.5 million debut in May and reportedly short of Paramount’s own internal hopes. 50 Cent celebrated anyway, joking on Instagram that he “wasn’t gonna be beat by a damn whale movie,” referring to Whalefall‘s fourth-place finish. The bigger story, though, may be what happened just behind it.

‘You Can See Everything’ Overtook ‘Street Fighter’ With A Fraction Of The Theater Count

Per daily box office figures, A24’s You Can See Everything overtook Street Fighter to become the No. 1 movie in America on Oct. 20, earning roughly $2.5 million to the Paramount film’s $1.8 million. Interestingly, the Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is playing in just 855 theaters, less than a quarter of Street Fighter‘s 3,575.

You Can See Everything pulled in $15.6 million from those 855 screens, a $17,500 per-theater average that roughly doubled Street Fighter‘s, with A24 reporting more than 2,000 sold-out showings. That stands as the second-biggest documentary opening ever behind Fahrenheit 9/11 and the best average for any film in under 1,000 theaters since Borat in 2006. For a nearly three-hour nonfiction film about a convicted tech fraudster, shot in the month before Holmes began her prison sentence and featuring Fielder in his signature deadpan interviewer mode, those numbers would have seemed somewhat absurd even two months ago, when the film wasn’t on anyone’s tracking radar.

A24’s Documentary May Be The More Unusual Box Office Story

The film sits at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes with a matching 97 on Metacritic, and the critics consensus reads: “Nathan Fielder’s ironclad commitment to the bit is pushed to its limit in You Can See Everything, an inscrutable Rorschach test of Elizabeth Holmes’s psyche that’s as absorbing as it is haunting.” Street Fighter, by contrast, is working with a 46% critics’ score and a B- CinemaScore, the same grade the Van Damme original earned in 1994.