The Summer Of The Doc

AH, SUMMER! THE SEASON OF SUPERHERO BLOCKBUSTERS and exhilarating action movies, enterprises that demand little more of us than shutting down some of our brain power and sinking into cushy stadium seats. But the summer of 2018 has put a wrinkle in that pattern.

- Stephanie Zacharek

We’re in the midst of a mini documentary boom, during a season in which a surprising number of people have made the effort to go out to the movies—to see a nonfiction film. Since its June release, Morgan Neville’s documentary portrait of beloved TV personality and children’s advocate Fred Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, has grossed $22 million at the box office. Two other docs—Julie Cohen and Betsy West’s homage to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RBG, released in May, and Tim Wardle’s potent and unsettling adoption saga, Three Identical Strangers, which opened in June—have also hit big at the box office, grossing some $13.7 million and $10 million, respectively.

Those figures are nothing close to what huge hits like Black Panther or Avengers: Infinity War have raked in. But they’re still surprising. Think of it this way: All three of these docs have already cracked the list of top 30 highest-grossing documentaries since 1982—and they’ve been in theaters for only three or four months. (The top-grossing doc since 1982, according to Box Office Mojo, is Michael Moore’s 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11, which has made $119 million to date.)