In mid-May, Taylor Swift’s father Scott called up his friend Joe Kernen, a veteran CNBC anchor, with a dilemma. The first leg of his pop star daughter’s record-breaking 52-stop US “Eras” tour was in full swing, blazing a path towards a projected $1.5bn in global revenues, but Swift’s management was struggling to find a suitable Hollywood distributor for a film of the concert.
Swift’s team wanted a quick release for the movie to satisfy the unquenchable demand from her fans, who had crashed TicketMaster’s site with 3.5bn ticket requests on the first sale day, but Hollywood’s slow-moving studio machine had suggested release dates as far away as 2025.
Kernen put Swift’s father in touch with Adam Aron, chief executive of cinema chain AMC and over the course of the next few months an unlikely deal was born between the world’s second-most streamed pop star and two of the biggest US cinema exhibitors that will from next week launch Swift’s 160-minute film in nearly 4,000 theatres across North America and thousands more worldwide.
As cinema operators face up to a sparse winter film slate, hollowed out yet further by the SAG-AFTRA union strike that prevents actors from promoting films and has led to winter blockbusters such as Dune: Part Two being pushed back to next year, Swift’s concert film will provide a much-needed financial boost.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour has sold more than $100mn worth of advance tickets globally, according to figures cited by AMC on Thursday. The film is projected to gross approaching $240mn domestically over its four-week run in North American cinemas, putting it among the top-10 best performing movies of the year, according to box office forecaster Cinelytic. Earlier this week, Beyoncé also announced that she had struck a deal with AMC to bring her Renaissance tour film to screens in December.
Tim Richards, chief executive of European cinema chain Vue, said the concert films had “come out of nowhere and will be a significant lifeline to cinema operators worldwide” as the industry grapples with “a quieter autumn than usual” because of the strikes. But in the longer term, he argued, it could be a coming of age for “events” cinema as “really big acts are suddenly realising that there’s another way of monetising their music concert”.
Cinemark, which is distributing The Eras Tour film in the US alongside AMC, said this week that presales were 10 times higher than for any previous event showing. AMC’s Aron has used Swift’s film to rally the chain’s army of retail investors, posting on social media platform X last month that it was “a monumental development for our company”. But AMC’s share price is still down 34 per cent since when the film was announced in late August.
So powerful is Swift’s draw for fans that Exorcist: The Believer producer Jason Blum said he was forced to move the premiere date of the film a week earlier to avoid a clash with Swift’s release date on Friday October 13, posting on X in August: “#Taylorwins”. Universal had originally set the Exorcist reboot’s release date in 2021, hoping to capitalise on the significance of Friday the 13th date to horror fans.
“The fourth quarter was looking more than a little fallow . . . but the Swifties have helped with that,” said Michael Kustermann, chief executive of Texas-headquartered Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, referring to the nickname for Swift’s most loyal fans. But he added: “I wonder what the longevity is in terms of artists who can generate buzz like Beyoncé and Taylor.”
While some cinema executives have talked up the long-term prospects for event-based cinema in light of Swift’s huge presales, other industry insiders and Hollywood executives are more cautious about the chances of a bevy of other major musicians announcing concert film releases in cinemas anytime soon.
Despite the success of the Barbie and Oppenheimer double bill over summer, global box office sales for this year, excluding China, are still expected to fall 21 per cent below the $33bn of sales in 2019, according to projections by research firm Gower Street Analytics.
Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, said the direct release of The Eras Tour film marked a “radical shift” from how movies are traditionally released. Swift will receive a larger split of box office takings from the AMC deal than she would have with a release through the studios, according to people familiar with the deal.
But Dergarabedian said “only an artist of this magnitude” could eschew the multimillion-dollar marketing budgets of the Hollywood studios in favour of “going straight to the consumer via social media”.
Moreover, the Hollywood strikes meant there was little competition for the film finding a slot in cinemas. “It’s serendipitous in more than one way,” added Kustermann. The film, which was shot over three nights at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium, is being distributed internationally by London-based company Trafalgar Releasing and negotiations are under way for the film to be released in China via a local distributor, said people with knowledge of the details.
“Who are the other artists that can possibly pull this off?” asked Michael Sukin, a veteran music lawyer who has represented The Rolling Stones and the estate of Elvis Presley. The only historical comparison might be Help, the film released by The Beatles in 1965, Sukin said. “The Beatles were bigger than god . . . I can’t think of another example”.
Demand for Swift’s tour far outstripped supply: 3.5mn fans registered for the presale to get their hands on tickets for a total of 2.6mn available seats for the US tour.
A cinema industry executive said Swift, with her 274mn Instagram followers, was a “unicorn” and was “not a template for how concert movies in general were going to perform”. The executive, who asked not to be named, added that Aron’s optimism about The Era’s Tour film was part of AMC’s business model “to keep having shiny new objects that he can convince his retail [investor] following they are going to change the business forever and quite candidly they won’t”.
An AMC spokesperson said the cinema chain was pushing into concert films “because they are exciting to millions of our customers and quite lucrative for our financial bottom line”.
A resolution to the actors’ strike, which has dragged on for more than 80 days, would be a much bigger fillip to the cinema industry, according to industry executives. In late September, the Writers’ Guild voted to end its strike after reaching a tentative agreement with movie studios over issues including the use of artificial intelligence in script development.
Swift, a SAG-AFTRA member herself, struck a deal with the union directly to allow her film to be released during the strike.
Kustermann said the impact of the strikes was “manageable at the moment” but he added he “[hoped] there will be resolution before the end of the year”.
“There’s going to still be some impact in 2024,” he said. “There’s been strikes in the past, there’s been resolution in the past, I firmly believe that will happen again.”
David Hancock, who leads cinema research at consultancy Omdia, said because of the strikes, the momentum the industry had gathered over summer from “Barbenheimer” looked set to “dissipate completely”. “Cinemas are struggling a bit for content and you need to get some content in there,” Hancock said. “[The Eras Tour film] does that without putting a film out there, and films are very precious at the moment.”
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