Neighborly Numbers: "Won't You Be My Neighbor" cracks $20M mark at the box-office

Morgan Neville‘s Won’t You Be My Neighbor? has been in theaters for less than 7 weeks, and yet the Fred Rogers doc is killing it at the Box-Office. It has earned close to $20 million. This obviously means a Best Feature Documentary Oscar nomination, at the very least.

There was a time when documentaries were HUGE. This happened around when "Bowling for Columbine" came out. Call it the Michael Moore effect but we got a slew of classic docs between 2002-2005 ("Bowling for Columbine," "Capturing the Friedmans," "Spellbound," "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Grizzly Man" and "An Inconvenient Truth.") Around this time "March of the Penguins" had taken advantage of "Penguin-fever" in the United States by racking up a $77M box-office intake, only second to "Fahrenheit 9/11" and its still record-breaking tally of $119M.

Are we entering another mini golden age of sorts for non-fiction? We shall see, but what's dominating the most are biopic docs such as "Neighbor," "Whitney,"and "RBG." That's what audiences seem to be wanting the most these days. Not necessarily a reinvention of the genre.