Earlier this year, as Taylor Swift was launching her $1 billion-dollar-grossing The Eras tour, she dropped into Hollywood for a spell. She met with a number of major studios to see if she might be able to drum up interest in distributing an Eras concert film. However, in the end, she chose to distribute sans a conventional studio partner.
This month, Hollywood is learning just what happens when you disappoint Taylor Swift. The concert film she ended up producing and distributing herself through an independent deal with the theater chain AMC is on track to open as the biggest hit in the history of October releases. It’s already crossed $100 million worldwide in ticket presales and some projections have it opening on Oct. 12 at more than $150 million in North America alone.
Even if those predictions turn out to be slightly hyperbolic, you know who won’t be seeing a nickel of that money? Any studio that tried and failed to seal the deal when Swift came calling. Astonishingly (again), Hollywood has been completely frozen out of what is surely going to be the biggest hit of a traditionally slow movie-going season.
What should be even more alarming to the studios, as they watch record numbers of ticket buyers stream into theaters to watch “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” is the possibility that this might just be the beginning of a trend. The success of Swift’s film could conceivably take a wrecking ball to the traditional film distribution model that’s governed Hollywood for a hundred years. If Swift can pull this off — cutting out the middleman studios and splitting the grosses with the theaters, not to mention the millions more to be made from peddling merchandise inside theaters — what’s to stop others from following in her footsteps? Who’s to say an outsider auteur like, say, Mel Gibson, or M. Night Shyamalan, who has been self-funding his $5 million to $20 million-thrillers for a decade, might not give it a try, too?
Many in Hollywood remain skeptical that Swift’s film is anything but a one-off, the sort of phenom only a giant international pop star with 273 million Instagram followers can pull off. Still, it’s a possibility the studios can’t afford to ignore. Already there are other self-distribution deals in the making, including one by Beyoncé, who recently cut an arrangement with theaters to self-distribute her own concert film in December.
TheWrap looks at the likely (and unlikely) impact of Taylor Swift’s decision to go it alone and leave Hollywood in her dust.
Theaters (Finally) Score a Win
After surviving the COVID-19 years — barely — there’s finally some good news for the theatrical business. AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. saw a net loss of $973.6 million in 2022, after losing $1.27 billion in 2021.
Swift’s concert film reaffirms the conventional wisdom that a traditional multiplex release is still the best way to make a major pop culture splash.
As Stan Ruszkowski, president of The Boxoffice Company, told TheWrap, “Swift’s choice to go with a wide theatrical release, as opposed to putting her filmed concert on streaming, affirms that the theater is still the place for wide-reaching, mainstream pop-culture events.”
But Not So Fast
A concert film from one of the most famous musicians on the planet sells itself. Not a whole lot more is needed.
But that’s not true for most other films; audiences still need to be told that it exists, what it’s about and when it’s arriving. And that gets expensive, probably too expensive to do without the help of an old-fashioned studio.
Alicia Reese, vice president of Equity Research for media and entertainment at Wedbush Securities, said that marketing infrastructures and bank accounts are where the studios still hold the cards. “It would be too costly for a single director/producer to replicate, and AMC doesn’t have the money to build out that type of marketing,” she said.
How much money would be needed? A feature film from the likes of Christopher Nolan — which generally costs closer to $150 million to produce than the $15 million Swift is said to have spent on her movie — would require at least $150 million to market. AMC’s not going to find that kind of money stuck under its theater seat cushions.
Even a filmmaker like Shyamalan still counted on Universal’s marketing might to spread the word. And the directors and actors who have the most clout in town don’t really need to bypass the studios; they’re already getting everything they want.
Why would Tom Cruise or Jordan Peele risk their own money on an untraditional distribution play when the studios are more than happy to pay the bills for them?
Even if it doesn’t make a huge amount of practical sense for an A-list auteur or actor to self-distribute, they might do it anyway — after all, they have plenty of cash and ego to burn. Cutting an independent deal with the theaters, as opposed to sticking with the studios, gives filmmakers more control and flexibility over the fate of their creation, allowing them to pick their own release date, rather than being slotted on the calendar when it best suits the distributing studio.
In Swift’s case, it means she can release her movie while her concert, now selling out arenas in Europe, is still scorching hot. That’s called priceless audience awareness. It’s also called bad news for Universal, who had to bump “Exorcist: Believer” up from its Oct. 13 release date when Swift planted her movie on Oct. 12.
Go Small Or Go Home
So, sure, this may not result in the next Nolan or Steven Spielberg film being distributed by AMC. But what about smaller non-concert films that play to dedicated fanbases? Like, say, genre movies or faith-based pictures?
“Terrifier 3” is already set to be distributed by Cineverse but there’s no real reason its producers might not try a direct distribution deal with AMC for “Terrifier 4,” if (fingers crossed!) there ever is one. And why wouldn’t the producers of “Sound of Freedom” – the cult hit religious thriller about child sex traffickers in Colombia – peddle a sequel directly to theaters instead of going through a studio?
“There have always been niche markets where appealing directly to the consumer can be smarter than employing the full machinery of a studio and traditional distribution,” said Bruce Nash, who runs movie-business information site The Numbers. “Although when we’re talking about someone like Taylor Swift, we might need a redefinition of what we mean by niche.”
In this potential cinematic future, small to mid-sized self-distributed movies would supplement studio-distributed tentpoles and help to fill the gaps in inconsistent studio release schedules. Even if the next wave of concert films or a wave of self-funded star vehicles don’t set the box office on fire, they could still be a healthy new addition to the cinematic ecosystem.
In other words, and to paraphrase a certain billion-dollar pop star, when it comes to self-distributing, maybe everybody needs to calm down.
