Yesterday morning, Taylor Swift announced on Instagram that her doc “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” would be theatrically released in nearly all domestic theaters for four weekends beginning October 13.
It turns out, the concert film, distributed by AMC, sold $26 million in ticket presales in less than three hours. It has beat the previous record of “Spider-Man: No Way Home”, which made $16.9 million back in late 2021. The doc is currently projected to have a $70 million opening weekend.
Swift’s doc is selling out many theaters and has created delays at some exhibitor presale websites. One distribution expert tells Deadline that these presales numbers are so big that they can be compared, and exceed, any of the major Marvel movies.
The total runtime for ‘The Eras Tour’ is 2 hours and 45 minutes. AMC is in brutal financial shape. This seems like a Hail Mary pass to save their business, especially with all of the fall movies that have already been delayed to next year, especially ‘Dune 2’.
The doc is expected to open on more than 4,000 screens, which could impact the October box-office. According to IndieWire’s Tom Brueggemann, studios are not happy. It’s come to the point where, just yesterday, Universal had to move “The Exorcist: Believer” from October 13th to October 6th.
According to Brueggemann, AMC seems to have broken an unwritten rule when it comes to movie distribution. The Swift doc came out of nowhere, and might have just shaken up the industry’s troubled ground even further:
Most of all, this is an aggressive, gloves-off move among the gentlepersons’ agreements that generally guide theater bookings. Distributors don’t surprise each other with release dates. Studios expect to have the lead time to defend their films’ priority at theaters. With Swift, AMC has committed screens for multiple weekends and made their unavailability a fait accompli.
Theaters’ ticket websites are are also having issues due to the high traffic to buy Swift movie tickets, which could damage Sony’s “The Equalizer 3” opening this Friday. It’s come to the point where AMC is now telling customers who want to see a movie this weekend to just show up in person to buy their tickets.
If anything, studio complaints will not resonate at a time when they are being portrayed as the bad guys during these stagnant negotiations with SAG and WGA. What this Swift doc proves is that theaters can find programming without their help and that must certainly scare the living daylights out of them.
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