By Karl Quinn
The Taylor Swift concert film took $3.8 million in its opening weekend in Australia, making it the biggest film of the weekend – ahead of The Exorcist: Believer in its second weekend ($684,000) – and giving it the 13th biggest opening weekend of the year, just behind The Flash.
The Swift film, though, opened on 480 screens, just under the 573 that showed the superhero movie in its first weekend.
By way of comparison, Barbie, the year’s biggest film by some margin, opened with $19.6 million in its first weekend (Thursday to Sunday) from 765 screens, while second-placed The Super Mario Bros. Movie opened with $10.6 million from 723 screens.
Taylor Swift performing during the US leg of her Eras Tour.Credit: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello
With a more targeted audience – albeit a massive one – and a limited run of four weekends only (so far, at any rate), Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is unlikely to come anywhere near toppling Barbie’s $85.8 million Australian yield.
The concert film could crack the top 30 by next weekend if it passes the $5.3 million lifetime gross of Shazam! Fury of the Gods. To break into the top 20, it will need to better the $9 million earned by The Flash over its full cinema run, and to crack the top 10 it will need to ease past Fast X’s $16.9 million.
Box Office Mojo reports that globally, the three-hour-long concert movie had taken $US128 million by the end of the weekend. However, lags in reporting times mean three-quarters of that take ($US97 million) came from the US.
The true figure is certainly much higher than that. The reported total does not, for instance, include the Australian box office result.
Even so, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour has already smashed the record for the biggest opening weekend for a concert movie in North America, more than tripling the $US31.1 million taken by Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour in 2008.
It has also eclipsed the $US99 million worldwide earnings of Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011) to become the highest-grossing concert movie of all time.
Although the film has been released simultaneously in multiple territories, Australian fans and cinema owners initially thought they might miss out because the concert tour itself does not arrive here until early next year.
The movie has not only been embraced by Swift fans, many of whom have been seen making and swapping friendship bracelets at craft tables set up in foyers as part of the experience. It has come as an enormous, and somewhat unexpected, boon for cinema owners, who were facing a dearth of product as a result of disruptions to release schedules caused by the strikes in Hollywood.
“All the cinemas jumped on it because the strikes are really biting,” said Palace Cinemas chief executive Benjamin Zeccola on Monday. “It’s saved our bacon, really.”
Swift will perform in Melbourne on February 16, 17 and 18, and in Sydney on February 23, 24, 25 and 26.
Contact the author at kquinn@theage.com.au, follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin, and read more of his work here.