Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ movie may have missed out on making millions more: report

Taylor Swift had a remarkably successful summer, with her Eras Tour bringing in billions of dollars.

Now, the pop icon is bringing the tour to a new audience. Last week, “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” debuted, a nearly three-hour film showing footage from the event in movie theaters. Even though ticket sales have been high, industry experts speculate that Swift could have brought in much more money had she made some different choices.

The big difference between Swift’s film and other movies is that there’s no Hollywood studio involved — instead, she struck a deal directly with movie theaters.

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This wasn’t necessarily a bad move — according to Variety, the movie has already grossed $123 million worldwide, with The Hollywood Reporter noting it brought in $90 million domestically. It cost an estimated $15 million to make, and without a studio to take cuts, that’s a pretty wide profit margin.

The film took the top spot at the box office last weekend, and even with Martin Scorse’s highly anticipated “Killers of the Flower Moon” bowing this weekend, “Eras Tour” is still expected to hold firm at number one.

Notably, it’s the highest-grossing concert film in U.S. history, and it’s the second-highest October debut.

Still, there are some things about the movie that have made it stand out from others, and not necessarily in a good way. One is that Swift has openly encouraged viewers to get out of their seats and dance and sing, something that’s certainly not typical movie theater etiquette — and something that many more traditional moviegoers certainly won’t appreciate.

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She’s also listed ticket prices at $19.89 for adults, a reference to her “1989” album, and $13.13 for children and seniors — 13 is her favorite number.

For audiences in some regions, these prices are much higher than normal, with some seeing as much as a $10 price difference between a Swift ticket and any other ticket for a showing in the same time range.

“It’s hard to balk at a $90 million opening,” a studio executive told The Hollywood Reporter. “I think it’s great for the industry… but there was money left on the table by not having professionals handle it.”

Another example of how different the release of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” is from other films happened with the movie’s opening: At the last minute, Swift announced that they’d be rolling out the film a full day early due to high demand, so the debut happened on a Thursday instead of Friday.

A source from a top independent circuit explained that the clear advantage here went to the big movie chains — AMC, Cinemark and Regal — telling The Hollywood Reporter, “It was pretty clear that only the top three circuits had full knowledge and were able to have their tickets on sale from the get-go. And that left basically every other circuit in America having to scramble and rewrite their schedules, reset their planning for the coming months and then also have the stress of, ‘What if we put tickets on sale and the website melts down?’”

Another source said, “Some of those [Thursday] shows did OK, and some were a ghost town. You’ve got all these fans who bought tickets to what they thought was the first show [and] a lot of them were going to wind up in a pretty quiet theater. It was framed as if [Swift] just decided that day, but I’d be shocked if that was the case.”

“I know the early shows didn’t hurt the ultimate gross, but it didn’t bring goodwill for the theaters. They were caught off guard,” another source shared.

Something else a more traditional release route could have helped with is marketing — the audience for the concert film has largely been only one demographic, when statistics have shown that Swift’s fan base is more diverse than that.

“It basically played to younger white females,” a studio distribution source revealed. “We could have done things marketing-wise to get more people.”

Despite any hiccups, box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian seems confident that the unusual decisions behind the release of Swift’s film will end up being viewed positively.

“The extra near-$100 million domestic box office added to the bottom line by the Swift concert film will ultimately be viewed as worth the stress caused by this weekend’s unprecedented and unique release,” he said to The Hollywood Reporter.