‘The Odyssey’ vs. ‘You Can See Everything’: Christopher Nolan’s Epic Suddenly Has a Documentary Chasing It in the Best Picture Race

A24 / Universal Pictures

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For most of the year, the Best Picture conversation has felt like a one-horse race. Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’ jumped to the top of Gold Derby’s Oscar leaderboard before anyone had even seen it, and the awards crowd has treated it as the film to beat ever since. Then an unlikely challenger came out of nowhere and started rewriting the narrative.

That dominance is easy to understand. Starring Matt Damon as Odysseus, the mythological epic opened to $264.1 million worldwide, the biggest global launch of Nolan’s career, and went on to cross $1 billion in less than a month to become his highest-grossing film ever. Its 95% Rotten Tomatoes score is also the best of his career, and the last time Nolan led a race like this, ‘Oppenheimer’ went on to win 7 Oscars, including Best Picture.

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Now, the betting crowd is weighing in. According to Polymarket US, ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘You Can See Everything’ are currently the 2 leading contenders to win Best Picture at the Oscars, with Nolan’s film sitting at 45% and the A24 documentary climbing to 25%. The ceremony is set for Sunday, March 14.

Polymarket isn’t alone in spotting the shift. Kalshi’s market shows a nearly identical picture, with ‘The Odyssey’ at 46% and ‘You Can See Everything’ at 24% after a 14-point jump. Over at BetOnline, the documentary has rocketed to 4/1 after opening at 25/1 in September, while ‘The Odyssey’ holds steady at even money.

So what exactly is ‘You Can See Everything’? Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the film follows disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans in the weeks before she went to prison in 2023. Fielder and his crew lived with the couple at their Del Mar home for roughly 5 weeks and stayed involved with the project for 3 years afterward.

A24 played its cards in an unusual way. The film debuted as an unannounced surprise premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, alongside a bizarre teaser in which Holmes asks Fielder why she would ever deceive him. By the time it reached theaters, curiosity was through the roof.

The box office numbers backed up the buzz. The nearly 3-hour documentary earned more than $15 million in its opening weekend on fewer than 900 screens, the biggest debut for a film on fewer than 1,000 screens since ‘Borat’ and the biggest for a non-music documentary since ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’. It also launched with a 4.7 rating on Letterboxd, making it the platform’s highest-rated feature film.

For all the momentum, ‘You Can See Everything’ is facing a steep climb. No documentary has ever even been nominated for Best Picture, so simply landing a nomination would make history. Ironically, its unconventional approach could actually work against it in the Best Documentary category, depending on how that branch of voters feels about Fielder’s genre-bending style.

Meanwhile, the industry’s top pundits still see Nolan’s film as the safe bet. The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg ranks ‘The Odyssey’ as his No. 1 Best Picture frontrunner, while also listing Fielder and Oppenheim among his Best Director contenders.

Other titles like ‘The Black Ball’ are lurking in the betting markets too, so the race may not be as settled as it once seemed. Whether the documentary’s surge is a passing wave or the start of a genuine upset, the next few months of awards season just got a lot more interesting.

Which film do you think will win Best Picture at the Oscars: The Odyssey or You Can See Everything?

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