Box office: Taylor Swift does her part to "save movie theatres"

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is already the top-grossing concert movie of all time in North America, and it may or may not have set a new record for best October opening ever.

Taylor Swift in The Eras Tour.

Taylor Swift singlehandedly saved the box office this week.

At a time when studios have been putting off some of their biggest films because of the actors’ strike, and the movies that have stayed put have underperformed more often than not, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour—a concert movie that was on no one’s radar even two months ago—came along and broke a few box-office records.

The Eras Tour definitely set a new record for concert movies. The box-office estimates this weekend have been less precise than usual, because there really are no precedents for a film like this—no models to follow when guessing how it will do on Sunday compared to Friday and Saturday, for example—but everyone agrees it made somewhere north of $90 million domestically this weekend, and that alone makes it the top-grossing concert movie ever in North America, a record previously held by Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, which earned $73 million in total back in 2011.

The Eras Tour might have also set a new record for best opening weekend in October—but we won’t know for sure until the actual figures come out later today, because that record is currently held by Joker, which opened to $96.2 million in 2019.

The Eras Tour is also running neck-and-neck with The Little Mermaid for the sixth-best opening of 2023 and the 15th-best opening of the post-Covid years—though with a budget reportedly under $20 million, The Eras Tour was much, much cheaper to make than all the other recent big openers and it will be much, much more profitable.

In a weird way, The Eras Tour combined aspects of two of the summer’s biggest hits:

• Like Barbie, The Eras Tour was a female-skewing crowd-pleaser with an iconic blonde personality at its core, and it attracted an audience that was ready to dress up for a night out and treat the movie as not just another film but a full-blown communal experience.

• And like Sound of Freedom, it came out of nowhere, it was distributed to theatres outside of the usual movie-studio channels, and it was successful because it tapped into an existing community of fans and followers.

  • Angel Studios—which began as a streaming service producing crowdfunded shows like The Chosen—launched its own theatrical distribution unit this year and announced Sound of Freedom’s release less than eight weeks before the film came out, complete with an unconventional “pay it forward” ticket-sharing plan that allowed fans to buy tickets for complete strangers.

  • Meanwhile, Taylor Swift bypassed the studios altogether and made her own distribution deal directly with a major theatre chain, which she announced on her social media accounts only six weeks before the film came out. Her fans responded by buying advance tickets in record-setting numbers.

There were other aspects to The Eras Tour that make this an unusual release:

• Tickets were reportedly priced a little higher than usual, at $19.89 for adults and $13.13 for youngsters, because those numbers are significant to Swift.

• Swift isn’t allowing the film to be shown on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, because she wants the fans to experience the film as if it were a concert, in crowded theatres, and not at half-empty weekday matinees and the like.

There were no other major new releases this week. A few films were going to come out this week, but they all got out of the way after The Eras Tour was announced. (Dumb Money and The Exorcist: Believer moved their release dates a little bit earlier, The Persian Version and What Happens Later moved their release dates a little bit later, and the “faith-based” Ordinary Angels jumped out of the way all the way to February.)

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: