It’s FOMO no more for global Taylor Swift fans. The singer and AMC Theatres announced Tuesday morning that the “Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour” concert film will open in more than 100 countries worldwide on Oct. 13, the same day previously announced for the its North American bow. Tickets for showings in most of those countries will go on sale immediately.
As with the previously announced American release, the film’s international rollout will be handled by AMC, acting as a global distributor for the first time. AMC said that the worldwide expansion will include the movie playing at every Odeon venue in Europe, adding that the company and its sub-distribution partners “are taking steps to reach agreements with additional cinema operators throughout the world.” With bookings are still in progress, AMC said that it expects the number of theaters playing the film in its global expansion to surpass 7,500.
It’s been just a little less than a month since Swift and AMC announced the film would hit screens in the U.S., Canada and Mexico on Oct. 13. With many chains and operators having jumped aboard since that announcement to join AMC (which will be hosting it at every U.S. location) in showing the film, the North American rollout is now said to encompass more than 4,000 theaters.
The long overseas component of Swift’s Eras Tour do not begin until early 2024, so some fans wondered if the singer would let some or all of those dates pass before releasing the film version in those territories she has yet to play. This announcement makes it clear that Swift doesn’t consider it a problem to give global fans cinematic spoilers before the record-breaking tour touches down in their cities.
Tickets for the concert film’s initial U.S. screenings moved so swiftly that other studios quickly moved some of their product off of planned Oct. 13 opening dates. Expectations for the movie’s box office went sky-high after AMC sold $26 million in tickets on the first day they went on sale, a single-day record for the chain; that number did not include the sales for other chains or independent theaters that also put tickets on sale that day.
Exhibitors expect the Eras Tour movie to approach or surpass $100 million in U.S. receipts during its first weekend; if it does have a triple-digit opening weekend, it will join the company of only five films that have managed that so far in 2023 (“Barbie,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”). Now, predicting same-weekend foreign box-office results can be added to the list of things Swift made industry forecasters do.
The running time for the film has been marked as 2 hours and 45 minutes. Even though that’s shorter than the nightly three-hour-plus length of her shows, Swift’s reps have assured fans that no songs have been cut from the setlist. So-called “secret songs” — representing the two-song wild card slot in her show — will be part of the movie, although which rarities made the cut have not yet been revealed. Director Sam Wrench’s cameras captured the first half of Swift’s six-night run at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium in August.
Most exhibitors are not expected to enforce traditional theater decorum during the run of the film. In her first announcement of the U.S. opening for the movie, Swift made it clear that concert, not film, etiquette will be the norm: “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing encouraged,” she wrote.
The concert film is not Swift’s only major October release. The latest album in her series of deluxe re-recordings, “1989 (Taylor’s Version),” comes out Oct. 27.
