The News
Pre-sale revenue for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour concert film totaled $26 million, AMC announced Friday, shattering the previous single-day record for movie ticket sales at AMC.
Less than three hours after tickets went on sale, Swift surpassed the previous single-day record of $16.9 million, held by Marvel’s Spider-Man: No Way Home.
SIGNALS
“Taylor Swift is in her theater-saving era,” Vanity Fair declared. Theaters have been anxious they won’t be able to replicate the success of the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon from earlier this summer, with a number of high-profile releases being pushed to 2024 because of the ongoing actors’ strike.• 1 The Eras Tour film announcement follows reports that the end of Swift’s North American tour could accompany a slowdown in consumer spending this fall.• 2
Swift’s parents negotiated the deal directly with the head of AMC, bypassing the studios that typically act as middlemen for these deals, Puck’s Matthew Belloni reported. The partnership is “as close to a no-brainer as exists in entertainment,” Belloni wrote, and still allows the Swifts to put the concert film on streaming after 13 weeks.• 3 With AMC also serving as the film’s distributor, the company acknowledged that the Swift deal “marks the inaugural step of a new line of business.”• 4
So much for an “Exorswift” weekend. The producer behind The Exorcist: Believer, which was slated to come out on the same day as the Eras Tour film, announced Thursday that his horror film will release a week earlier. #TaylorWins, he said on social media.• 5
Swift’s film could mark the return of concert movies being released in theaters, experts told CBC.• 6 Stars like Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, One Direction have debuted their films in theaters, but that trend slowed as streaming picked up. Swift herself sent her Reputation tour concert movie straight to Netflix back in 2018.
