Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras Tour’ Film Sets All-Time Box Office Record, Passing ‘Michael Jackson’s This Is It’
While Taylor Swift missed out on scoring her first Golden Globe win at Sunday night’s (Jan. 7) awards show, the singer notched yet another record last week when the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie entered the record books as the highest-grossing concert/documentary film of all-time.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, after the three-hour concert doc hit theaters in late 2023 for a limited run, the film’s recent opening in China helped push the film into the No. 1 slot all-time among concert and documentary films. With $8.7 million in grosses in China following its debut on Dec. 31, the Eras Tour movie has surpassed $261.6 million, pushing it past the previous record holder, Michael Jackson’s This Is It, the posthumous 2009 doc that grossed $261.2 million at the global box office.
The Eras Tour movie rolled up a vast majority of its record gross during its record-setting opening weekend in October, when it pulled in $92.8 million in North America and $30.7 million internationally (for a total of $123.5 million); the total gave the Eras doc the biggest opening of all-time for a concert movie, besting previous record-holder, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, which racked up $73 million in its opening frame in 2011.
Eras Tour distributor AMC Theatres said in November that the Swift film had crossed the $250 million mark, placing it among the top 20 biggest films of 2023. Swift’s chronicle of her record-setting tour grossed $179.2 million during its nine-week initial run in theaters.
“On behalf of all of us at AMC Theatres, I send my congratulations and eternal gratitude to Taylor Swift for her remarkable and record-setting box office performance,” AMC Entertainment chair-CEO Adam Aron said in a statement on Sunday. “Her spectacular performance delighted fans around the world and serves as another strong reminder about the power of extraordinary filmmaking and magic of movie theaters.”
While the Eras movie run has ended, Swift will be back on the road on Feb. 7 when she plays the first of four dates in Japan at the Tokyo Dome before moving on to Australia and Singapore before beginning a run of spring European dates in Paris on May 9.
Gil Kaufman
Billboard