Musk Moves to Digital on November 6, and Alex Gibney's Four-Hour Documentary Is Finding Its Audience at Home

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Bleecker Street is putting Musk on paid video-on-demand on November 6, almost three weeks earlier than the November 24 date it announced at release. The official line is overwhelming pre-order demand, and there is some evidence for it: the film has been sitting in Apple's top fifty pre-orders. The unofficial reading is that a four-hour documentary about Elon Musk was never going to hold cinemas, and it did not.

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The numbers tell the story. Musk opened on October 9 on 472 screens, dropped to 60 by last weekend, and has grossed around 650,000 dollars. That is a poor result for an Alex Gibney film with this much press, and a few outlets ran pieces asking whether the film was being deliberately buried. Bleecker Street says no. It is still playing in a handful of cinemas and will keep playing after the digital release, and HBO still has it for the winter.

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I saw it in the first week and the length is the point. Gibney, who made Going Clear and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, builds the case slowly, from PayPal through Tesla and SpaceX to the Twitter purchase and the government year, and the film is at its best when it just lets Musk talk in old interviews and then shows what happened next. It is not a hit piece. It is a long, cold look.

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Four hours is a lot in a cinema seat and almost nothing at home, where you can pause and come back. That is why I think the VOD move is right, whatever the real reason. Documentaries about living, litigious billionaires have a hard time in theatres, and this one had the additional problem of being about someone a large part of the audience has already decided how they feel about.

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It will be on HBO eventually, so there is a free route if you are patient. Did you see it in a cinema, or is a four-hour Musk film something you can only face in two sittings?