It makes no sense why major arthouse studios don't theatrically distribute more documentaries

The Box Office History for documentary movies chart on The-Numbers is far from perfect. Chiefly, it's confusing why Justin Bieber's Believe is considered a documentary and not the singer's 2011 documentary (also from director Jon M. Chu!) Never Say Never. However, this page otherwise provides valuable data about documentaries and their reputation with the public. box office presence. As of this writing, documentaries have only grossed $22.04 million domestically. Only a pair of Amazon MGM Studios features (The Blue Angels and I Am: Celine Dion) comprise 2024 documentaries from major studios released in hundreds of theaters. Otherwise, the 2024 theatrical documentary cinema is a bunch of right-wing nonsense and creepy Christian docs released by Fathom Events.

No wonder the domestic box office presence of documentaries is in the gutter. These titles are stuck in a tragic vicious cycle. The biggest arthouse studios (A24 and Searchlight Pictures namely) never give documentaries significant theatrical releases. Thus, there are no major recent documentary box office hits in the marketplace. Studios then use that as an excuse to say “People don’t go to documentaries anymore.” The absence of such films theatrically is extra puzzling. After all, there’s really no reason the biggest arthouse studios shouldn’t embrace documentaries on the big screen.

Now, let’s be clear about something: documentaries have always struggled to get financing and distribution. Even back in 2005, Focus Features, and Fox Searchlight had no documentaries on their respective release slates. Miramax only put out one documentary that year, Deep Blue. Looking at the biggest documentaries ever domestically, the vast majority are IMAX documentaries (which ran for years and years), a handful of nature docs from Disney and Warner Bros., concert films, and political features. Today, exploitative true crime fare dominates the streaming documentary space thanks to these projects being rooted in news stories audiences are already familiar with. However, even the biggest theatrical documentaries focused on easily recognizable figures (Michael Jackson, Al Gore, Michael Moore, etc.) There have always been problems with getting more proletariat-focused documentaries to become box-office successes.

Still, back in the mid-2000s, there were far more options for documentary filmmakers to get theatrical distribution for their works.  After that boom, The New York Times reported that, by June 2010, "the commercial market for feature documentaries has crashed". A new ray of hope emerged for the big screen documentary at the end of the 2010s. This was when a string of documentary hits struck box office gold. I Am Not Your Negro, They Shall Not Grow Old, Won't You Be My Neighbor?, RBG, Three Identical Strangers, Apollo 11, and Free Solo all hit the kind of box office numbers once thought impossible for traditional documentaries. The fact that they all hit figures as high as $15+ or 20+ million in North America just before the pandemic is such a bittersweet fact. That momentum got wiped out once theaters closed.

That hot streak alone, in which major studios like Warner Bros., Focus Features, and Neon put real marketing money (and even some IMAX screens) into promoting documentaries, should push arthouse studios to recommit to this domain. What’s extra puzzling about most studios abandoning big screen doc’s, though, is that there was a clear sign that theatrical documentaries had box office juice in 2021. That’s when Roadrunner: A film About Anthony Bourdain grossed $5.3 million domestically, including $1.98 million on opening weekend. That number was noticeably higher than the box office hauls of pre-COVID summer 2019 documentaries like Pavarotti ($4.68 million) and Echo in the Canyon ($3.35 million).

That should've been a promising start to a streak of major studio documentaries in 2021 and beyond. Instead, studios largely abandoned these titles. Neon got Moonage Daydream and Fire of Love to $1+ million in 2022 (the former even hit $4.2 million). However, Focus Features, A24, and Searchlight Pictures put out zero new documentaries that year, Part of what made the 2018/2019 documentary box office hot streak possible was that new audience-friendly movies were coming at a steady clip. Three Identical Strangers got promoted on Won’t You Be My Neighbor, for example. Free Solo got pushed on Strangers. That wasn’t possible with how vacant the major documentary space was in 2022. Even National Geographic Films, which had such success with Free Solo in 2018, only put out one recorded theatrical film (The Territory) in 2022 (though they did get a production credit on the Neon-distributed Fire of Love).

Part of the inevitable problem with theatrical documentaries is that spiritual successors to the biggest 2018-2019 docs (profiles of famous celebrities) have largely migrated over to streaming. Save for the occasional Piece by Piece, new equivalents to RBG, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, and Pavarotti have all ended up on Disney+, Amazon, Peacock, and other platforms.  In the late 2010s, moviegoers weren’t showing up to experimental documentaries like Hale County, This Morning, This Evening. They went to the theater to watch documentaries on pop culture icons like Aretha Franklin or The Beach Boys. With streamers and their big pockets cornering this market, it’s hard for theatrical documentaries to compete. 

The current post-March 2020 default release strategy for arthouse titles also doesn’t benefit documentaries. In the wake of COVID-19, arthouse labels big and small now open new arthouse titles immediately into hundreds of theaters. This already doesn’t work with narrative films like Kneecap. It really doesn’t fit, however, documentaries. This is a medium that really needs a gradual theatrical rollout to make a box office and cultural impact. Big 2018 documentary hits like Free Solo and Three Identical Strangers didn’t make all their money in one three-day period.

They played for weeks and weeks so that word of mouth could really spread like wildfire. With big arthouse labels like Sony Pictures Classics and Focus Features employing a one-size-fits-all all-release strategy for arthouse titles, documentaries immediately face an extra box office hurdle. This is not the way to birth successful documentaries, especially in an ultra-competitive pop culture landscape. 

Another sad element affecting theatrical documentaries is the evolution of major movie distributors over the last five years. Neon, for instance, got some of its biggest initial hits with documentary movies. For a while, Neon couldn’t launch an English-language narrative film (save for I, Tonya) to save its life. Narrative titles like Wild Rose and Assassination Nation flopped (tragically so in the case of Wild Rose, that movie slaps). Meanwhile, Neon saw terrific box office returns for Apollo 11, The Biggest Little Farm, and Three Identical Strangers. Documentaries put Neon on the map…but after 2022, the indie label has largely abandoned documentaries. Neon released no docs theatrically in 2023. In 2024, Neon’s only theatrical documentary is Saving Mavis Beacon. In a sign of the time, Neon sent the star-studded doc Brats to Hulu.

Jeff Deutchman head of Neon acquisitions, recently said that the studio has to be choosier in the titles it distributes. Neon has moved on to bigger narrative films (like Longlegs, Cuckoo, and Ferrari) and self-financing movies. In the process, documentaries have fallen by the wayside. The cinematic form that put Neon on the map is getting the short straw as the company evolves. Meanwhile, A24 is famously terrible for just dumping documentaries like The Sixth or Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind to streaming and PVOD with no promotion whatsoever. A24 sent Lamb out into wide release immediately yet won’t take a chance on a theatrical documentary.

Then there's the Searchlight Pictures situation. This studio drastically reduced its theatrical output once Disney purchased it. With fewer Searchlight movies going to theaters, a studio that already had minimal forays into documentaries (which included He Named Me Malala, Step, and Summer of Soul) has stepped out of the theatrical doc space entirely since July 2021. CBS Films, which distributed Pavarotti in 2019, no longer exists. Amazon MGM Studios used to distribute documentaries like Gleason and I Am Not Your Negro through other studios. Outfits like Open Road Films or Magnolia Pictures gave these titles lengthy theatrical runs.

In 2024, the only two big screen Amazon doc's got basically one-week runs in theaters. Amazon is now focused on big mainstream movies like Road House and the upcoming Masters of the Universe adaptation. The arthouse and documentary titles Amazon initially focused on rarely get major theatrical runs anymore. Greenwich Entertainment, which distributed late 2010s documentary hits like Free Solo, Echo in the Canyon, and Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, has barely existed after 2020. On and on the examples go. Studios once fixated on distributing documentaries either have abandoned this realm or no longer exist at all.

Just in the five years since 2019, the theatrical distribution options for documentaries have been overhauled. The consolidation of the theatrical distribution space in the last seven-ish years has been a nightmare for documentary filmmakers. With that consolidation comes an even greater emphasis on safe, risk-averse cinema. What surviving arthouse label wants to distribute acclaimed indie titles like Union or No Other Land that might implicate corporate owners like Disney, Amazon, or WarnerDiscovery? These entities would rather finance and release another cozy celebrity doc (preferably one highlighting movies/TV shows from their library of pop culture properties), not something evoking Harlan County USA or Kokomo City in showing a vested interest in the proletariat. The current theatrical landscape is a nightmare zone for documentaries all the way down. 

It doesn’t make sense why theatrical movie studios have abandoned documentaries. Titles like Roadrunner showed these projects can still make money in the wake of COVID-19. Sadly, nothing in the current film industry makes sense. Studio executives keep saying they need to fire artists and abandon movies “to keep costs down” while CEO salaries get bigger and bigger. Through this reality, a variety of longstanding problems with the film industry just keep getting worse. This includes the theatrical distribution of documentaries, which wasn't exactly a dreamy utopia even back in 2005. However, in this current landscape, theatrical documentaries, despite frequently showing off their box office prowess, keep pointlessly getting excluded by nearly all major movie distributors big and small.