Disney was locked in a bidding war with Netflix and Universal for streaming rights to “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour”—Disney’s Bob Iger prevailed, and ended up paying the Swift family more than $75 million to stream it on Disney+.
This won’t be the last partnership between Swift and Disney. There’s been quite a bit of buzz about how Swift, who performs music and sells out stadiums, is actually a good director. The push is to turn Swift into a legitimate filmmaker.
In December 2022, she had announced her Disney-backed Searchlight-produced directorial debut with an original script, written by her. How serious is this? Very serious. It’s happening. Puck’s Matt Belloni is saying that Swift is itching to get behind the camera and will be doing just that, immediately after her ‘Eras’ tour is done.
The Taylor-Swift-is-a-good-director buzz has been carefully curated via industry players like cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who called Swift an “excellent director.” “Deadpool 3” filmmaker Shawn Levy banged the drums for Swift as well, comparing her to none other than Steven Spielberg.
Some probably don’t know this, but Swift has directed 18 music videos so far in her career. Whether that’ll translate into a successful filmmaking career is a whole other story. The part that worries me most is that she wrote the screenplay for this movie of hers.
Maybe Swift hired a ghost writer, or a Paul Thomas Anderson, to clean up her screenplay, but you can definitely expect a team of talented people will make sure that her directorial debut does not turn out to be a disaster.
Swift is likely to continue touring until, at least, this summer, so production will likely not start before the third quarter of 2024.