EXCLUSIVE: Since going on sale at 7:15 a.m. CT this morning, ticket presales for AMC’s concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour are well past $10M and counting, we hear from sources. By the end of the day, this presales figure will be tremendously north of what we’re seeing. Swift’s presales here bury the one-weekend-play gross of Trafalgar’s BST: Yet to Come, which did $8M earlier this year.
Watch a trailer for The Eras Tour, which hits theaters in October, below.
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This enormous presales figure for the pic’s four-weekend play is making distribution executives fall out of their chairs — and reach for their Just calculators. They’re trying to figure out how this concert film distributed to the top three circuits, and possibly more theaters, will do in its opening weekend, off what largely will be a marketing campaign fueled by circuits’ social media, email blasts to loyalty clubs and Swift herself.
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What does The Eras Tour even comp to in regards to presales?
“Some Marvel movie,” adds a distribution guru.
They’re right: Days before Eternals opened, presales were at $13M. But The Eras Tour is poised to be crazy higher. Keep in mind that Star Wars: The Force Awakens did $20M on its first day of presales — nine weeks out from its release date back in 2015!
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Certainly, AMC doesn’t have the marketing spend of a major studio a la Disney, Sony and Paramount, which opened their respective docu-concert movies to big numbers, i.e. Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert ($31M opening, $65.2M final in 2008), Michael Jackson’s This Is It ($23.2M, $72M in 2009) and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never ($29.5M opening, $73M domestic in 2011).
“They don’t need that,” cried one distribution boss today about the pic’s P&A spend. “All AMC needs is Taylor Swift posting about the movie on social media to her fans.”
AMC said in pre-release that it will limit the showtimes of other Hollywood pics due to the presence of the Swift movie, for which a separate movie ticket sales portal has been created to accommodate huge demand. Also, AMC Stubs members aren’t getting priority treatment when it comes to passes on the film or immediate queue access.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film will not compete with Universal/Blumhouse/Morgan Creek’s The Exorcist: Believer on its opening weekend, that female-skewing horror movie having just moved to October 6 within minutes after Deadline’s story posted. However, Swift will go up against Lionsgate’s Ordinary Angels on October 13, then versus Apple/Paramount’s Killers of the Flower Moon on October 20, and Uni/Blumhouse’s theatrical day-and-date of Five Nights at Freddy’s on October 27. The Eras Tour is really the only wide release during the first weekend of November, with Dune: Part Two now in March 2024.
AMC, has tapped Variance Films to book the movie, did not return Deadline’s request for comment about Swift presales.
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