Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour premiered at The Grove in Los Angeles on Wednesday with a surprise appearance from Beyoncé, ahead of what increasingly looks like a huge $150 million global box office bow — on par with a Marvel Studios tentpole superhero film. The film opens wide on Friday the 13th, a number and day with special meaning to her, and runs on weekends through the first week of November and could go longer.
At a projected $100-150 million domestic and $50 million or more internationally, The Eras Tour gets an added boost from above-average ticket pricing that is still vastly lower than the usual inflated prices for concert tickets. It set records for AMC with $26 million in first-day pre-sales domestically.
But here is the thing: It’s already topped $100 million in pre-sales worldwide, and that was six days ago. So keep in mind, current estimates are potentially too conservative and there’s a chance I should be predicting a $150 million opening in North America alone. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
With weekend-only dates (which also includes some Sunday screenings, apparently), the film can make each weekend feel like another chance to attend a concert with a large crowd of fans for a premium concert experience at a bargain rate. If the film lives up to expectations and delivers an elevated concert movie experience, and if premium theaters in particular can take full advantage of the potential of this event release, then I believe it will trigger a renaissance for the concert film genre.
Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé arrives December 1st to keep momentum going for concert films, and has already impressed with first-day pre-sales total of up to $7 million. Those numbers will obviously soar far higher as the weeks pass, and international sales will be enormous too.
One of many great things for theaters — and any studios that own a library of popular music still capable of making the concert rounds — is that while other genres must worry about oversaturation of the marketplace, concert films are designed to inherently appeal to specific sets of built-in fanbases that are potentially larger than any given movie star or movie franchise.
And theaters can sell concert movie tickets at higher prices to fans happy to pay it, because it’s much cheaper alternative to attending live concerts, as well as a more interactive sort of theatrical experience justifying a higher-than-usual ticket price.
The biggest global pop sensations can turn out tens if not hundreds of millions of fans, and even the next lower tier of popular music can generate so much interest it’s comparable to a successful mid-range budget feature film. But concert film costs are far lower, of course, so solid marketing spending and promos combined with investing in making the theater venue a wonderful alternative for crowds who miss the live performances can pay off exponentially and deliver huge revenue streams.
If theaters demonstrate to fans that their venues can match the excitement, quality, energy, merchandising, and celebration atmosphere of a concert but within different parameters — for example, supplying a first-row experience to every person in the theater, compared to nosebleed seats in a stadium, offering 3D and superior audio experiences like Dolby Atmos — then concert films can build upon the imminent blockbuster success of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé as a permanent major addition to theatrical distribution and box office.
Because let’s face it, theaters need something to put audiences back in theaters again at reliable rates. The current list of top 20 grossing films at the box office is a collection of soft performers, disappointments and rare successes.
Besides summer blockbuster holdovers Barbie at $1.43 billion and Oppenheimer at $940 million, the only other sizable success in the entire top 20 is The Nun II with $249 million. The only other successes are either low-budget modest performers like Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie and Saw X.
It’s a mostly weak field from now until November when The Marvels arrives in over four weeks. Killers of the Flower Moon drops on October 20th and will probably do good business — it better, as it needs to cover a $200 million budget plus marketing expenses, which requires a roughly $550 million box office gross. The empty field for a few weeks will certainly help, as will inevitable award season buzz (and the helpful fact Martin Scorsese’s controversial remarks denigrating comic book films were perfectly timed to generate extra headlines and coverage via free earned media.)
But this all means 2023 is continuing to mostly suffer anemic releases and box office results. Trolls Band Together, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Napoleon, and Wish close out the back half of November and a couple of those might break out, but the trend lately suggests the Trolls sequel will perform so-so, the bizarre Hunger Games prequel will disappoint, and that Wish could perform fine but not up to expectations.
Napoleon, I’m less sure about, but I’m inclined to assume it’ll do modest business but not break out because the runtime limits screenings and it will be up against too many other competitors.
So November could be another month of pain for theaters, apart from The Marvels and the hope that a couple of new releases motivate audiences to show up in decent numbers into December, where Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom hopes to be the tentpole to beat (but faces the DCEU box office curse and could become the ninth DCEU film in a row to fail to reach $400 million). And aside from a few other contenders including The Color Purple and Migration, that’s it for the rest of the year, as far as narrative feature films are concerned.
This is all without even considering what might happen with the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike and studios’ refusals so far to make a deal with the guild. Likewise, other possible strikes loom, and this could all dampen prospects for timely theatrical releases as studios shift schedules and delay releases. Theaters are feeling the heat already, and any additional delays in releases and shutdown of productions means theaters will see another hard year in 2024.
With that picture of the rest of the year in mind, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour coming this weekend and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé bringing Christmas early is indeed a lifesavers for cinema. Without the upcoming infusion of revenue during times otherwise largely devoid of anything to drive enough attendance to aid the industry, theaters would limp into the New Year battered and in need of salvation.
Instead, concert films could become just what theaters and audiences needed, bringing new prestige and interest in these movies as a great alternative to live concert attendance, as well as setting up the incredible potential for live theatrical broadcasts of exclusive concerts held in smaller venues to maximize the immediacy and intimacy of the setting and performance for the audience.
Consider the potential for a space like The Sphere in Las Vegas, with its eye-popping immersive experience. What might a Beyoncé concert be like in that venue and in 3D, for example?
Admittedly, The Sphere cost more than $2 billion to create, but that’s for a space housing nearly 20,000 attendees. Building spaces like The Sphere big enough to still properly impress, yet small enough to avoid being cost-prohibitive, would still entail costs of perhaps $500 million for a space big enough to seat approximately 4,500 people. But imagine the potential not just for concert films, but for other feature films — a future Avatar sequel, for example, at that scale and that immersive potential could take maximum advantage of everything James Cameron is trying to achieve.
I believe it would be important to incorporate 3D into the mix, and for concerts to film the performances with an eye toward incorporating other aspects of the Sphere’s technology to do things that can’t be done in a live performance alone. And with just two or three big concert films each year, plus a few franchise tentpoles, a venue like this could be making enough money to more than justify the expense of building it.
Once films catch up enough to mainstream trends and technologies to incorporate augmented reality to make theatrical attendance even more immersive and interactive, it will be premium theaters that benefit the most — and again, a smaller equivalent to the Sphere could take even greater advantage of things like AR, VR, and eventually new interactive technologies that all seem the most suited for optimizing live concert experiences and similar event screenings.
This might seem like a lot of additional speculation, but that’s necessary and smart at this point, because musicians, the recording industry, studios, theaters, and audiences need to prepare themselves for the rapid speed with which society and media are going to change in the next few/several years.
Beyoncé and Swift are already ahead of the curve on concert cinema, and are well positioned to take full advantage of those coming changes — just how well positioned will be apparent when the receipts are added up this weekend.
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