Have you ever repeated a joke so often that you forget the grain of truth that makes it funny? Mine has to do with my occupation. Although I am first and foremost a film critic, my joking answer to the question “what do you want to do as a career?” is that my dream job would be to review movies and Taylor Swift albums for the rest of my life. Don’t worry; I’m not starting that venture now. I’m first and foremost a movie lover, and this space will continue to be reserved for cinema. But these two passions of mine have recently overlapped in a bit of Hollywood intrigue that has prompted me to speak now. This is me trying to make sense of the invisible string that may exist between Taylor Swift and the future of Hollywood cinema, in the form of her upcoming concert documentary.
The Latest Rise of ‘Miss Americana’
In November of 2022, pop star Taylor Swift announced a concert tour via Good Morning America and her social media accounts. Dubbed “The Eras Tour”, the act would feature songs from across her 17+ year music career, splitting the 10 album-long legend of her rise to the most prevalent pop star of today into distinct eras. The concert quickly performed beyond even the artist’s wildest dreams. Tickets priced from $49 to $889 sold out within hours, setting records and crashing the concert ticket site Ticketmaster. New tour dates and cities were added bit by bit, bringing the total number of shows from the 27 initially announced to 53 shows across the United States in 2023, with an additional 9 coming in 2024.
“The only thing I can compare it to is Beatlemania.” - Billy Joel (New York Times).
International fans had their social media prayers answered when Swift started adding dates across the globe. iHeartRadio estimated that 31 million people registered for the tour’s presale for Canada’s 6 shows alone, which is more than 77 percent of Canada’s total population (38.25 million). The tour brought havoc to the ticketing systems of every continent, with 13 shows scheduled in South America, 10 in Asia (only Japan and Singapore), 7 in Australia, and 47 in Europe, for a total of 146* shows across 5 continents, most of which are sold out or near sold out. The tour began in March of 2023 and is currently scheduled to go until November of 2024.
The Eras Tour has had a frankly ridiculous influence on commerce, foreign and domestic. Social media reports of flights filled with fans and hotels sold out in advance have given the tour a reputation for huge commercial impact. Its financial boon to its cities has led politicians to request the Eras Tour stop nearby to help their economies and tourism. President Gabriel Boric of Chile is among the public officials to write to Swift personally but was denied a tour visit. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with the singer personally one month before her Canadian shows were announced.
In the US, the frustrations of Swift fans with the Ticketmaster platform fueled President Biden’s campaign against “junk fees” in the entertainment industry, a platform which started less than a month before Swift’s tickets first went on sale. The site’s controversial mishandling of Eras Tour ticketing resulted in a rare bipartisan moment where congressmen red and blue questioned the company’s president and skirted around accusations of monopoly, a label upon which the Department of Justice will decide as over two dozen fans have sued the company for unlawful conduct.
“To have a strong capitalist system, you have to have competition,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, who called the hearing. “You can’t have too much consolidation — something that, unfortunately for this country, as an ode to Taylor Swift, I will say, we know all too well” (CNN).
It’s safe to say that Taylor Swift’s fans, or Swifties as they call themselves, are a powerful force to be reckoned with. No entertainment industry can stop their manic fandom, and their influence is unprecedented in an online, disconnected culture. And now, the monster that is Swift fandom has set its hungry eyes upon my purview: the crumbling state of today’s Hollywood. Studios should be quaking in their boots; I don’t know about you, but I’m feelin’ funny too.
Meanwhile, ‘Sparks Fly’ in Hollywood
In April of 2023, The Writer’s Guild of America (WGA), representing thousands of film and television writers across Hollywood, voted to go on strike if a deal was not reached with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Disagreements mainly, but certainly not exclusively, have centered around minimum wages and streaming media residuals. The WGA claims that a typical screenwriter’s income has been cut down significantly by the rise in streaming media, as residual checks have not been adjusted for the high volume of shows and movies that depend on internet-based distribution for success. The use of artificial intelligence bots as a replacement for writers has also become a source of strife, with the AMPTP unwilling to negotiate with writers on where AI use is appropriate.
The AMPTP represents what could end up being the last great American dynasty of production studios in these negotiations; Amazon Studios (current caretaker of MGM), Apple Studios, Lionsgate, Disney, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount, Sony Pictures, and Warner Bros. Discovery. For my layman readers, those are the studios behind, more or less, every movie or television show you’ve ever seen or are planning to see. The WGA estimates its proposals would give writers approximately $429 million per year, almost five times the AMPTP’s proposal of $86 million. No deal between the AMPTP and the WGA was reached, so baby, now we got bad blood.
“Though we negotiated intent on making a fair deal — and though your strike vote gave us the leverage to make some gains — the studios’ responses to our proposals have been wholly insufficient, given the existential crisis writers are facing. The companies’ behavior has created a gig economy inside a union workforce, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing.” - the WGA negotiating committee (Vox).
The WGA officially went on strike on May 2nd, 2023, causing most work that didn’t yet have a completed script to cease on television and film across the country. Picket lines were orchestrated around major studios as writers protested in front of major studios, from 30 Rock in New York to the streets of Los Angeles. Everything has changed. Productions affected include the next two Avengers movies from Disney, Lionsgate’s Dirty Dancing sequel, Transformers plans from Paramount, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse from Sony, and both Community: The Movie and the upcoming live-action How to Train Your Dragon remake from NBCUniversal among many many others.
Apparently ‘tis the damn season for strikes. On July 14th, 2023, the Screen Actors Guild - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) brought Hollywood to an absolute standstill by going on strike, citing again minimum pay rates, residuals related to streaming services, and the regulation of AI as a filmmaking tool as two of their main platforms. Actors walked out on the vast majority of major productions; any mainstream film you were looking forward to seeing but isn’t yet finished has halted production until the strike ceases. Promotion and association with the studios in general has been discouraged across the board, even for those outside of SAG-AFTRA or the WGA; anyone at all who associates with one of these struck studios while the strike is ongoing should’ve said no in the guilds’ eyes. Everyone who supports the strikes is encouraged to disavow any way that profits the studios, short of unsponsored critique, unbiased news, and seeing their movies, which is still allowed and encouraged.
It’s been a necessarily cruel summer for cinema, but there is hope. Some studios unassociated with the AMPTP did reach agreements with the WGA and/or SAG-AFTRA by agreeing completely to their terms. Surprisingly, or to a cynic perhaps obviously, these are mostly independent studios like A24 (Everything Everywhere All At Once, Moonlight, Bodies Bodies Bodies) and NEON (Petite Maman, Triangle of Sadness). These studios were allowed to move forward with production and promotion utilizing SAG-AFTRA actors as they agreed to all the terms of payment etc. that much larger studios claimed would be too difficult and costly to them.
The bigger studios responded not by negotiating with the guilds, but by pushing back the release of their movies that were already finished. Under SAG-AFTRA strike rules, actors aren’t allowed to promote projects created by struck companies, meaning the marketing behind films and television productions would have to happen without its face-forward talent. Releases scheduled for this year like Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros. Discovery) and the as-yet-untitled Ghostbusters: Afterlife sequel (Sony) were pushed to next year as studios feared putting out movies nobody would hear about without an actor to promote them, leaving a blank space late in the year. Inevitably, something, or someone, would fill that void.
Are you ready for it?
‘Look What You Made Me Do’
Just days ago on August 31, 2023, our pop star announced a concert film titled Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour (yes the pipe symbol is part of the title) coming to North American theaters on October 13. The film seemingly would give Swifties a chance to experience a bit of the “Eras Tour” without having to deal with the hassle of the live show’s insanity. To orchestrate distribution, Swift went full mastermind; rather than choose one of the major studios that had been struck to distribute the film, the singer/songwriter placed her concert film directly in the care of AMC Theaters. This guarantees distribution without dealing with the struck against studios to stay in a state of grace with the strike’s boycotting rules. You can guess what happened next.
Immediately following the film’s announcement, internet searches for AMC Theaters spiked 1000+%, and their stock enjoyed a noticeable bump. The movie set a record for the highest-ever single-day advance ticket sales revenue at $26 million, beating out the previous record holder Spider-Man: No Way Home at $16.9 million. AMC was unable to keep up with demand, forcing some Swifties to wait 20+ minutes on the AMC app or website to prebuy a ticket to the film. The theater chain added extra showtimes and increased the capacity of their servers to meet the record-breaking per-hour ticket demand. As the film’s theatrical distributor, they have also partnered with Regal Cinemas, Cinemark, and more to bring the movie to more screens across the continent.
A central appeal to Swifties of seeing the film in theater is its community experience. When announcing the concert documentary, Swift herself tweeted “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing encouraged” followed by an abbreviation of a chant fans in the know call out at a certain moment during her concert. Theaters have resigned themselves to the likelihood that their screenings will be filled with screaming and singing along, and some have gotten into the fun by promoting that they will have friendship bracelet stations (a staple of fan’s concert outfits) and sell collectible buckets and cups for the event.
Already the concert movie has had a huge impact on this year’s cinematic landscape as movies clear the way for Swift’s arrival. On the day of the concert film’s announcement, Universal announced that The Exorcist: Believer would be premiering a week earlier to avoid competing for Swifties’ attention. The next day, Meg Ryan’s directorial return to rom-com What Happens Later announced a similar fate, electing to push back three weeks into early November. Martin Scorsese fans excited about the director’s upcoming latest work Killers of the Flower Moon have expressed fear on The Website Formerly Known As Twitter that they’re next, as even the film’s October 20th release date doesn’t seem too safe a distance out of the woods.
Also, tickets to see the movie at an AMC theater are exactly $19.89, so that’s just awesome.
“The only place where you can replicate the global excitement of Taylor Swift’s live concerts is inside a movie theater with immersive, state-of-the-art projection and sound alongside a vocal crowd of passionate fans… [Swift shows] the true potential of what a concert film can do in theaters. This is a great opportunity for fans to experience a huge cultural phenomenon in a very accessible way.” - Michael O'Leary, president and CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners (USA Today).
Why is this such a big deal? Both studios and theaters have found themselves in trouble over the last couple of years. Shrinking audiences, strikes, and symptoms of the global pandemic have reduced theatrical profits, and every studio is eating their own tail with streaming services to solve the problem. Part of their resistance to dealing with the strikers is likely due to these streaming troubles. Of the major streamers, only Hulu and Netflix have actually turned a profit, while the services created by singular traditional studios like Max, Paramount+, Peacock, and even Disney+ have been unable to make as much from the services as they’ve spent on them. With Netflix reporting a loss of subscribers in recent years, it’s clear that all studios spending sprees are caused by fear of being an exile of what many consider to be entertainment’s future, rather than being based on sustainable numbers.
Swift’s mad woman approach to distributing a cultural event of a concert film with a theater company rather than a traditional studio could be a game-changing play in the midst of Hollywood’s uncertainty. The big studios only are being given a message that if they don’t play nice, there are clearly ways of working without them… at least if you have enough cultural and monetary cache to do so. For all the picketing and cleverly written signs that guild members have lined Hollywood streets with, the studios are likely to simply tolerate it; they are deaf to anything except money. Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour is predicted to make $100 million in its opening weekend, a number comparable to Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid which made $95 million in its first weekend. If that prediction proves correct, in its opening weekend alone the concert documentary will be 21st domestically in the top-grossing films of the year, just behind Warner Bros.’ The Flash at ~$108 million, and it would be set to climb much higher in subsequent days.
Perhaps losing out on the incredible amount of money that Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour will generate will wake studios up to the truth about their industry; people are still willing to go to the theater for a community experience, and streaming will not replace that. The studio’s tight grasp on streaming residuals is based on a false god ideology that streaming will eventually turn a profit for them if they just give it a chance, and that paying writers and actors a fair wage on their streaming movies and shows will somehow eliminate that chance. Although Swift’s film might be an anomaly due to the musical artist’s insane fanbase, its success should show them not only that audiences crave the communal viewing that only a theater can provide, but that if they don’t provide that experience someone else will without them.
Although nothing is set in stone, and the Swift concert movie’s limited release model only has it playing Thursday to Sunday every week, some box office analysts predict it being the number 3 movie domestically of the year, behind only Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Perhaps these predictions are optimistic, and there’s no guarantee studios will react so favorably to change their minds about the strikes or their streaming models regardless. You can call it what you want, but if there’s anything recent history has taught us it’s that we shouldn’t underestimate Taylor Swift and her incredibly loyal army of followers.
More Anthony:
The latest episode of Always See Everything, the movie podcast I cohost, is themed around game night! Tune in to hear us talk David Fincher’s The Game if nothing else.