In one weekend, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert film of all time, beating Justin Bieber: Never Say Never‘s entire box office run. It also topped therott entire theatrical run of the recent DC movie Blue Beetle. By the end of the weekend, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour earned $92.8 million, which is lower than many (including me) expected it to make, but on a nothing budget of $15M, that’s still quite impressive. Add in foreign markets and The Eras Tour made around $123M.
This marks the second-best October opening ever, trailing just behind Joker which generated $96.2M in 2019.
It remains to be seen whether this concert film will have legs. Will Swifties come back for more? Will casual fans turn out now that the opening weekend frenzy is over?
The Eras Tour is only screening on weekends and is almost three hours long, which limits the number of times it can be shown. Those factors could limit its intake. There are also other stumbling blocks including the fact that… well, Taylor Swift is for girls. 80% of the audience for The Eras Tour was female. That’s a big market, but generally, males make up the majority of film audiences and Swift just doesn’t appeal to them.
Swift met with major studios to distribute this concert movie but ultimately chose to partner with the AMC theater chain. This led to some misunderstanding as people thought The Eras Tour was ONLY screening in AMC theaters, but it’s actually available at various multiplexes with different owners. So if you couldn’t catch it on opening weekend, there are more opportunities.
As I stated last week, The Eras Tour is one of those cinematic experiences that “sucks all of the air out of the room,” meaning that was basically the only thing anyone heading to theaters saw. But there are other movies out there. You can check out the Top Five below:
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- Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (AMC) – 3-day $92.8/ Wk 1
- The Exorcist: The Believer (Universal) – 3-day $11M/ Total $48.6M/ Wk 2
- Paw Patrol 2 (Paramount) – 3-day $7M/ Total $49.9M/ Wk 3
- Saw X (Lionsgate) – 3-day $5.7M/ Total $41.4M/ Wk 3
- The Creator (New Regency/20th Century) – 3-day $4.3M/ Total $32.4M/ Wk 3
Next weekend sees the release of Martin Scorsese’s latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, which features Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. This is an awards contender but I don’t see a massive general audience taking the time to see this in theaters. I mean, it’s no Taylor Swift concert.
But what about you? Did you “Shake It Off” in the cinema to The Eras Tour this weekend? Or is Scorsese more your “Style?” (See what I did there? Okay, I’ll show myself out.)
