Like movie theaters across the country that are facing the fallout of an actors’ strike and the shift to streaming, the Oriental Theater in Milwaukee was quite pleased to have Taylor Swift’s concert film coming to its screens.
But “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which has been a box office rainmaker, comes with an unconventional stipulation: Theaters may only show it Thursdays through Sundays, said Cara Ogburn, the artistic director of Milwaukee Film, which runs the Oriental Theater.
So what to do, she wondered, on the other three days of the week?
“What if we show all Jake Gyllenhaal movies,” Ogburn suggested offhandedly, initially as a joke. “True counterprogramming.”
The idea quickly expanded. The team’s resident Swiftie assured leadership that the theater would not be canceled for a lineup based on the pop star’s famous exes. Then staff members selected qualifying films that also had Halloween-adjacent themes.
Starting next week, the three-screen art-house theater will show the original “Twilight” (Taylor Lautner, a.k.a. the werewolf Jacob Black), “Dunkirk” (Harry Styles, a.k.a. One Direction heartthrob turned nondescript World War II soldier), “Crimson Peak” (Tom Hiddleston, a.k.a. a pre-Loki baronet) and, yes, a lot of Gyllenhaal.
There’s “Zodiac” on Tuesday.
“Enemy” plays on Oct. 29, followed the next night by “Nocturnal Animals.”
Then, on Halloween, comes “Donnie Darko.”
It may be true that Swift’s songbook is only “minimally about romantic love,” as Taffy Brodesser-Akner recently observed in The New York Times Magazine. But Swift is well aware of the way she has been caricatured for having, as she puts it in “Blank Space,” a long list of ex-lovers who will say she is insane.
“We were surprised to discover how many boyfriends she has had who have been in movies,” Ogburn said of Swift, who was connected to Lautner in 2009, Gyllenhaal in 2010, Styles in 2012 and Hiddleston in 2016. (Recently, she has been seen with the N.F.L. player Travis Kelce.)
“Then we whittled it down to — what is a good movie?” Ogburn said. Finally, she said, the team had to consider what films it could actually get the rights to show.
Independent movie theaters that show more than blockbusters often target specific fan bases. In the same month that the Oriental Theater has organized and branded “The Exes Tour,” it is hosting the Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival and showing older horror favorites and current Oscar contenders like Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
But the most vocal crowds are expected for Swift’s concert film, which in many places has become a glitter-filled, Eras-inspired mega event. She has encouraged viewers to treat the outings like the many concerts that captivated fans this year, urging the exchange of friendship bracelets and dancing to the songs that Swifties know by heart.
The desire for packed theaters and a concertlike atmosphere might help explain the unique scheduling requirements for “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which collected nearly $93 million domestically in its first weekend. It also has standardized symbolic ticket prices: $19.89 for general admission and $13.13 for everyone else.
Ogburn, whose team created a special drink menu for the movie’s run (red wine, for instance, became simply “Red”), said she had not fielded complaints about movie theater etiquette. “We’re kind of into enthusiastic moviegoing,” she said. “A little applauding like you’re at a concert is nothing we can’t handle.”
She did wonder whether there would be a less kind reaction to “Donnie Darko,” a 2001 cult classic in which Gyllenhaal’s disturbed character encounters a life-size rabbit.
“Will we get Swifties booing?” she asked.
