Taylor Swift performs during her Eras Tour on July 14, 2023 in Denver.
Tom Cooper/tas23 | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
… I am ready?
With less than 24 hours on the market, ticket sales for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert film have already broken records.
Fandango reported Friday that the singer’s film is in the top 10 best first-day sellers of all time, alongside Avengers: Endgame, Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Spider-Man: No Way Home .
“Taylor Swift brings the ultimate gift to cinema fans and the industry at large by… [the] Taylor Swift Eras Tour concert film to the big screen,” said Jerramy Hainline, senior vice president at Fandango Ticketing.
AMC Entertainment reported that ticket sales for Swift’s film hit $26 million on Thursday, a new record for the century-old company. Previously, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” had set the highest single-day ticket sales record at $16.9 million.
IMAX has already sold out more than 250 showings and is overstating advance sales. The company told CNBC it’s getting the same percentage of pre-sales as it would for a blockbuster tentpole film.
“Rather than launching an event via streaming, it launches it right from the theater window,” IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond told CNBC’s Squawk on the Street on Friday. “It confirms what most studios have said … that a theatrical release adds value to later windows like streaming.”
“While it’s awesome, I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of cookie cutters because there’s only one Taylor Swift,” he said.
Swift’s concert film documents the hugely popular tour, which grossed millions and was on track to gross a record $1 billion earlier this summer.
It supplanted Universal’s The Exorcist: Believer, which announced it would push its release date a week earlier, just hours after news of the pop star’s departure broke.
Swift’s concert film was originally only planned for the country’s largest theater chains, such as AMC, Regal and Cinemark.
AMC, the world’s largest cinema chain, has added additional domestic seasons to increase capacity in line with demand. The nearly three-hour film, which hits theaters October 13, will be shown in AMC theaters at least four times a day on Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through early November.
Wanda Gierhart Fearing, Cinemark’s chief marketing and content officer, said in a statement that the film “driven frenzied traffic to our website and app as soon as ticket sales started.”
“We’re ready for Swifties to be mesmerized by this concert film in the unprecedented number of venues we’ve booked to meet demand for the shared musical experience,” she said.
Smaller cinema chains quickly requested access to the film, which is scheduled to run until November 5. Before the end of Thursday, most domestic cinema chains were offering seasons in their cinemas with premium formats such as IMAX and Dolby.
Movie theater chains told CNBC that the highest number of tickets sold on Thursday were for screenings on the concert film’s opening weekend. Box office analysts are speculating that Swift’s concert film, Era’s Tour, could gross more than $100 million compared to its debut.
The film’s release comes at a time when Hollywood is grappling with double labor strikes and the elimination of films like Warner Bros. and Legendary Entertainment’s Dune: Part Two from the 2023 film list.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal owns Fandango.
Source : www.cnbc.com