It wasn’t long ago that the documentaries at the top of the box office each year were also the films on everyone’s lips. Think of Hoop Dreams or Roger and Me or, more recently, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: movies that attracted a diverse audience, garnered awards attention, and made a respectable amount of money.

The list of this year’s top-grossing docs is a very different story. Instead of the next Grey Gardens or Grizzly Man, 2024’s top 10 is a hodgepodge of faith-oriented films, a movie in praise of Donald Trump, and glorified trolls clearly intended to appeal to those on the starboard side of moderate. A few celebrity-driven projects and a compilation of cat videos round out the list. At the very top, where Anthony Bourdain and David Bowie once perched, you’ll find Am I Racist?, a bizarro-world Borat–meets–Bowling for Columbine from conservative media outlet the Daily Wire.

The vast gap between what many of us think of as prestige-style documentaries and what actually charts at the box office these days is fairly new, according to most industry experts I spoke with. Where they disagree is why that is. Some say studios don’t want to put more traditional docs in theaters, preferring the lower-risk path of plopping them straight onto streaming. Others blame savvy targeted social media campaigns, the same kind used to spread misinformation and sow political strife. Still more argue that for too long, filmmakers have been out of touch with the interests of the American population, and that this year’s box office reflects that divide. They might all be right.

“The documentary marketplace is overflowing right now,” says film business analyst Jeff Bock. “You could call it the golden age of documentaries.” Jaie Laplante, artistic director of DOC NYC—the country’s largest documentary film festival—agrees: “Documentaries’ golden age continues, it just continues in a new phase.” For that, we can thank streaming platforms, which make nonfiction films easier than ever to distribute and market straight to audiences. “I can’t imagine trying to market all those theatrically,” Bock says of the increasing number of documentaries available to stream.

Films about widely known quantities are an exception to the rule. “Unless you’re tied to an event like a Taylor Swift, it’s going to be almost impossible to pull off” a successful nonfiction theatrical release, Bock says, referring to the singer’s 2023 Eras Tour film. (While not classified as a documentary, that movie was 2023’s 11th-highest-grossing film domestically.) “Think about where media is today: It really is dominated by IP. They know Jesus, they know God, they know the Blue Angels. They know cats. These are things that we’re familiar with and will spend time and money on.” Documentaries that play into that need by apparently celebrating patriotism—or dismissing cultural changes—have a built-in audience.

For studios and distributors, “whatever gets butts in seats is what really matters,” says Bock. One company that appears to have figured out that equation is Fathom Events (which, as of January, will be renamed “Fathom Entertainment”), a distributor co-owned by the country’s three biggest theater chains: Cinemark, Regal, and AMC. “This company was first started years ago on the concept that we would try to put butts in seats Monday through Thursday,” CEO Ray Nutt tells me from his Colorado office, which is decorated with framed posters of theatrical releases including The Chosen—a fictionalized account of the life of Jesus Christ, which Fathom brought to theaters to great success. “That has changed significantly. I’ll be honest with you, it’s probably easier to get inventory in movie theaters when the commercial product is down.”

Fathom has taken advantage of struggling theaters by slotting in films like Jesus Thirsts: The Miracle of the Eucharist, a movie in praise of the Catholic faith that boasts one of Mark Wahlberg’s brothers as a producer. Unless something happens in the next two weeks, it will close out the year as the third-most-popular nonfiction film at the box office, just behind Piece by Piece, Pharrell Williams’s LEGO-infused bio-documentary. (Vanity Fair reached out to representatives for Jesus Thirsts for comment, but did not receive a response as of publication time.)

Another Fathom release, The Ark and the Darkness, claims to prove that the Biblical account of an all-encompassing flood (the ark in the title is Noah’s, not Indiana Jones’s) is true. It’s being counted as the fifth-highest-grossing documentary of the year.

While Nutt’s theatrical partners clearly deserve credit for getting niche films in front of larger audiences, there are other ways to build audiences for religious films like these as well. The company actively courts religious groups outside regions where Fathom’s faith-focused films are playing. “We license that content to them, to the church, and then the churches actually show it,” Nutt says. “That is something that we feel really, really good about doing, to make sure that people in those smaller communities that don’t have a movie theater in a reasonable distance from their homes can see our content.”

The church screenings, he adds, are “not a giant revenue thing for us”—but this strategy clearly can goose a movie’s box office. For a genre where most films sell tickets in the thousands (if that), any group ticket sales can be pretty significant.

Proponents of faith-based films also use social media ads encouraging email campaigns. Rebecca Fons, the director of programming for both Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center and the Iowa Theater in the small Midwestern town of Winterset, has been on the business end of those campaigns. “You can imagine that I program really different films here in Chicago than I do in Iowa,” she says. At the latter venue, she’s been urged to show “Trump content—or, you know, Catholic content or Christian content.”

“They do these grassroot campaigns where they will target folks on social media, people who kind of live online. And they will say, ‘Contact your local cinema, contact your local community spaces, and tell them they have to show this film.’ You know, like, ‘Why aren’t you showing Vindicating Trump?’”—director and conservative ideologue Dinesh D’Souza’s film promoting the president-elect, which is the sixth-most popular documentary of the year. “These distributors are very smart and very attuned to the demographics in a community, what the voting blocs are, and what the kind of appetites are in different regions of the country,” says Fons.

In Vindicating Trump’s case, the distributor is SDG Releasing, a company founded by Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman, who also wrote, directed, and produced the anti–Planned Parenthood drama Unplanned and were cowriters for the God’s Not Dead film franchise. They launched their company in July 2024 as a reaction to “Hollywood’s ‘creative accounting,’ which always ends with, ‘You get nothing,’” Solomon wrote on LinkedIn at the time. The industry’s unequal distribution of wealth is certainly a bipartisan issue. More divisive are SDG’s releases, like Vindicating Trump and the biggest doc of the year, Am I Racist?.

I reached out to SDG Releasing for this story, but a rep hadn’t responded as of publication time. If they had, I would have asked what compelled the distributor to get into the theater game amid one of the industry’s worst years ever. Documentarian Chris Metzler, who also programs San Francisco’s 23-year-old DocFest, has a theory. “The nature of streaming is so passive,” he says. If you watch a film at home—much less on your phone—it’ll have a smaller impact than one you see on a huge screen, after looking for parking and hitting the concession stand. At the same time, visiting the theater has become a political gesture, with moviegoers “buying into a movement. They know that their dollars are going to support a cause that they believe in. Those Trump documentaries, and Am I Racist?, are part of that.”

Jeremy Boreing, a filmmaker and the co-CEO of right-wing media company the Daily Wire, agrees—and says that this is precisely why he once avoided documentaries as a genre. Documentarians have “a sort of nonprofit mentality,” he says. “The essential value proposition you’re making is, ‘Wouldn’t you like it if a movie like this existed?—subtext, for someone else to watch?’”

“People would come to me all the time pitching documentaries because they knew I wanted to be in entertainment,” says Boreing. “I would say, ‘No, no, no. When we get into entertainment, we’re going to get into fiction. We’re not going to get into documentaries. I don’t want to make content that people don’t actually want to sit down and watch.’”

That changed when Matt Walsh, a conservative author, commentator, and podcast host, approached him with the idea for What Is a Woman?—in which Walsh would thinly veil his identity, Sacha Baron Cohen–style, to criticize contemporary gender discourse. “I was not interested in doing it,” Boreing admits of the 2022 release, which received a significant boost from Elon Musk in 2023. “Every parent should watch this,” the anti-trans mogul said of the film—which has faced criticism not just for its stance against rights for transgender people, but for allegedly spreading misinformation about gender-affirming care and misrepresenting itself to participants. According to Walsh, most of those criticizing the film had not watched it, and he disputed claims that the film contains misinformation.

“As he talked about it and as he outlined his vision for it, I came to realize he was really describing a piece of truly entertaining content,” Boreing says of Walsh’s original pitch for What Is a Woman?. “Did it have a message? Yes. Could it be effective in the culture wars, which are obviously a priority for the Daily Wire? I thought so, although I certainly didn’t think 36 states would adopt legislation to ban transgender surgeries for minors as a result of the movie.” (Vanity Fair has been unable to confirm links between Walsh’s film and laws banning gender-affirming care for minors. According to the Human Rights Campaign, 26 states have enacted bans on gender-related health care for transgender people as of August 2024.)

Both the ethos and apparent success of What Is a Woman? laid the groundwork for Am I Racist?, though again, Boreing says he was reluctant to work on the film. “My initial reaction was, ‘Your next documentary? I don’t want to make a ‘next documentary.’” But Walsh’s idea to go undercover once more as “the opposition,” as Boreing says, won him over. (Walsh himself agreed to an interview with Vanity Fair via a Daily Wire representative, but scheduling challenges prevented us from speaking prior to this report’s deadline.)

The resulting film—from its structure to its box office success—is proof that there still is a theatrical audience for docs akin to the one that existed in the 1990s, just with a different set of values. “Michael Moore is a singular talent, and he pioneered in the genre,” Boreing says when I say that in Am I Racist?, Walsh reminded me of the Bowling for Columbine director. “A lot of the techniques Matt was using were pioneered by the left.”

“But the left’s skills at this sort of work—and at comedy broadly—have atrophied from success. The left has been ascendant culturally to the point of having hegemony in the culture for the better part of 20 years now, and so they haven’t had to use these muscles—even though, of course, they developed most of these techniques. That left an opportunity for someone like Matt to rise up on the right and further evolve those techniques,” he continues.

Borat, Brüno, and Baron Cohen’s other real-life-adjacent films weren’t marketed as documentaries, even as they made headlines for their controversial and unscripted interactions with politicians such as Rudy Giuliani. But according to Am I Racist? director-producer Justin Folk, the real difference between his film and Baron Cohen’s “is that Borat is making fun of everyday Americans.” Walsh does deftly skewer the kind of guy you see still hanging around his college town years after graduation, wearing a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt—but I’m not sure what makes Giuliani more “everyday” than that archetype. I wonder if Folk’s “everyday” comment is intended to suggest that Am I Racist? isn’t intended for people like that, or people like me.

Boreing’s initial plan was always to offer the film online, because “we keep more of our subscription money…than a movie ticket.” Yet his company released the movie in theaters, and people did come. “They saw it, and it wasn’t the thing that they expected it to be. It was quite good, and that made them become an advocate for it to their friends and their family. That word of mouth certainly helped us spread the film, the message of the film.”

And through its theatrical release and popular reception, Boering thinks that Am I Racist? has achieved the mainstream legitimacy his ideological compatriots have been denied. “We have enormous success behind our paywall, but the media doesn’t ever have to grant us any of those successes. I wanted to be in a place where there were stakes, and stakes mean that we could win and that the machine, which is largely dominated by the left, would have to acknowledge our victory.”

That said, the Borat films were both nominated for Oscars—one for the first, two for the second. Based on the documentary nomination short list released by the Academy last week, Am I Racist? will not be. “I, of course, knew we would get snubbed—I knew that there was no chance that we would win an Academy Award for this film,” Boreing says. “But I actually am fairly shocked that we weren’t on the short list.

“You have not only the biggest box office success that a documentary has had this year, or in the last two years or in the last three…and the left couldn't bring themselves to even acknowledge that it was a possible contender.”

Actually, it’s been six years since any doc has earned more than Am I Racist? at the box office. In 2018, the top grossing docs were the previously-mentioned hit Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, reunited-triplet yarn Three Identical Strangers, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic RBG. While all were short-listed by the Academy, only RBG got an actual nomination, suggesting that the gap between box office and awards consideration isn’t necessarily a matter of owning the anti-libs.

Chris Metzler, the documentarian, says that the doc market is cyclical, one with booms and busts. “And you know, every cycle that comes after the bust has resulted in what people consider pretty transformative films,” he says. “So that’s what keeps me hopeful.”

Filmmaker Dan Reed is just finishing a project that will receive a limited theatrical release. It’ll be one of his first works to do so, despite a decades-long career that includes Leaving Neverland, HBO’s groundbreaking doc about the child sex abuse allegations against Michael Jackson. According to Reed, the rightward lean in the year’s top docs is yet another “sign of the times.”

“The distrust of the mainstream media is so high, there is obviously a big audience for these grand narratives making sense of the world,” Reed says. “The fact that they make no sense, or very little sense, to the rest of us doesn’t really matter.”

The audience for films like Am I Racist? has been marinated in social media, and is perhaps haunted by the suspicion that an amorphous group (let’s call them “the left”) are laughing at them. According to Reed, these audiences “look to the cinema as being independent—and not MSM [the mainstream media] or something being streamed at us by ‘globalists.’”

“We can go to a theater,” Reed imagines them thinking. “We can all sit there, together. And we can watch something true.”