The Taylor Swift effect
On Aug. 31 2023, global pop sensation Taylor Swift announced the release of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, a concert film. Similar to the Ticketmaster fiasco created by her United States ticket presale, Swifties crashed the AMC site in an attempt to purchase the limited tickets to see this film on the big screen—despite the company’s best efforts to upgrade the website to handle more than five times the largest ticketing traffic it previously experienced. Following a day of absurd ticket sales, AMC announced that The Eras Tour documentary broke its single-day sales, topping the previous benchmark set by Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Total ticket sales revenue amounted to roughly $26 million, about $9 million more than the prior benchmark. Due to such high demand, AMC added additional showtimes to increase capacity, playing the movie multiple times a day at every AMC theater location in the US.
The film is scheduled to drop on Friday, Oct. 13, the same release date as Jason Blum’s sixth Exorcist movie, Believer. Fans around the U.S. were excited about the potential of another Barbenheimer event—aptly dubbed Exorswift—where movie watchers could see both The Exorcist: Believer and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour on the same day. However, the horror movie mega-producer decided to reschedule the film’s release due to the overwhelming attention that Swift got by announcing her new concert documentary. Blum announced this change as a Tweet, including Swift’s Reputation album lyrics to admit defeat. He says, “Look what you made me do. The Exorcist: Believer moves to 10/6/23. #TaylorWins”. The franchise has been creating horror films since 1973, yet they still bowed down to the 33-year-old singer. Swift went on to “defeat” another five movies, which have now moved their release dates to avoid competition. These movies include Priscilla, Dumb Money, The Persian Version, What Happens Later, and Find Your Purpose.
This is Swift’s fifth tour movie, following films made for Speak Now, Fearless, 1989, and Lover. Since the moment the Eras Tour broke Ticketmaster, it was clear that this tour would become the biggest of the year, if not all time. Swift takes fans on a journey through top hits from nine of her ten albums during a three-hour performance. She includes fan favorites such as “Cruel Summer” “Look What You Made Me Do,” “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” “August,” and many others—adding up to a whopping 44 songs. Since dominating 2023 with new music and a remarkably popular tour, she is projected to claim the position of highest-grossing concert tour of all time.
Some of Swift’s recent achievements are mind-blowing—here’s a few of them: Swift is the first-ever woman with four albums in the Billboard chart top 10 simultaneously. She has the most number-one albums by a woman in music history. The Eras Tour has become the most-attended concert by a female artist in the U.S., which is unsurprising; on opening night, she beat Madonna’s record for most attended U.S. concert by a female artist with a crowd of about 69,000 fans. At her Pittsburgh show, she told the crowd, “No group of people this big has ever gotten together for one thing in Pittsburgh ever.” This tour could be the first to gross over $1 billion, topping Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour, which grossed about $939 million over five years.
The Taylor Swift Effect is real. The mastermind Taylor Swift has broken hundreds of records in her lifetime. She continuously surprises fans, tops the charts, creates number-one hits, sells out both concert and film tickets, and even causes some of the most successful film directors to change their release plans. I mean, she did tell us that she would “never go out of style.”