Telluride’s Surprise Movie Sparks Industry Guessing Game As Studio Buyer Emerges; Update With A Winner — The Dish — SkimNews
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- A24 was confirmed as the studio behind Telluride's mystery surprise screening, having acquired the project for worldwide rights in a competitive buy rather than developing it internally.
- Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim directed the previously unknown documentary about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, which Fielder co-created with Benny Safdie and was shot roughly a month before Holmes was sent to prison.
- The hybrid documentary runs 174 minutes (close to three hours) and drew strong early social-media reactions from attendees of the Telluride screening, which kicked off at 6:30 PM local in the Herzog Theatre under a Yondr phone-lock system.
- A24 plans to release the Holmes access doc in October, dropping a teaser shortly after the Telluride reveal; Holmes herself was tweeting about the film the same day.
- Deadline explicitly ruled out rival A24 titles as the surprise — including Ethan Hawke's Highway 99 (which debuted at Telluride last year), Ken Branagh's Goblin, Zac Efron's Famous, and Ruben Ostlund's Entertainment System Is Down — because none fit the hybrid format or the recent competitive acquisition timeline.
Why it matters: A24 landed a competitive acquisition on a buzzy, nearly three-hour hybrid doc tied to one of the decade's most-watched fraud cases, giving the studio a likely awards-season and October release vehicle while Holmes remains a publicly active subject. The competitive buy, rather than internal development, signals A24 paid a premium to control worldwide rights on a project already generating strong early reactions out of Telluride.
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