It can’t be overstated how big of a shock to the system Taylor Swift‘s “The Eras Tour” concert film release was back in 2023. The movie was announced just weeks before its release, it set a precedent for a major artist essentially circumventing studio distributors and going directly to theaters, and it disrupted the release calendar so much that we still haven’t heard the end of it from rival distributors who got burned and pushed to the sidelines. The film’s $261 million worldwide box office was a much needed salve for what would’ve been a down year in theaters.
Announced again just weeks in advance, Swift’s latest surprise theatrical release, a visual album companion for her twelfth album “The Life of a Showgirl,” again topped the box office with an estimated $50 million worldwide. It’s less than half of what “Eras Tour” opened to even domestically back in 2023. But there are reasons why “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl” was never going to match or beat “The Eras Tour,” and it’s an impressive — if not box office shattering — result all the same.
Where “Eras Tour” was a legit concert film documenting what has now become the biggest global tour of all time, “Showgirl” was an album film for songs literally no one had heard yet. That inherently meant the audience for the film was going to be reserved largely for super-fans, many of whom bought tickets in advance and front-loaded the box office. $15.8 million of its total haul came on Friday alone. That it brought in only $34 million domestic (plus $16 million internationally), speaks to how many Swifties needed to see it as soon as possible on Friday night and then didn’t go on Saturday or Sunday. Those ravenous fans still gave it a rare A+ CinemaScore, naturally, which is certainly kinder than some music critics were to the album itself.
Some other factors: “Showgirl” was a one-and-done, single weekend event and won’t be held over the way “Eras Tour” hung around in theaters for a few weeks. “Showgirl” was roughly 90 minutes long compared to the three-hour running time of “Eras Tour,” which would’ve allowed for a few more showtimes, but also didn’t have Thursday night previews (the album released at midnight last Friday morning). And perhaps most notably, “Eras Tour” had a premium price tag of $19.89 (we’ll call it $20) whereas “Showgirl” was a more traditionally priced movie at an average of $12 a ticket nationwide. Given all that, “Showgirl” has still already surpassed what Beyonce’s “Renaissance” concert film, also released in 2023 direct to theaters by AMC, did at the box office with $44 million globally.
All of this still had an impact on the box office as a whole. “Showgirl” likely snagged a few premium screens away from Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” which managed only $11.1 million domestic in its second weekend and dipped 49 percent from its first weekend, though it did manage to cross $100 million at the global box office. “The Smashing Machine” with Dwayne Johnson also likely took a bit of it on the chin because of Swift’s presence, as the film opened to just $6 million domestic.
Most crucially, the box office for the year is still 4 percent ahead of the pace of 2024 at this same time in the calendar year. We’ve written about how a few titles have vacated 2025 and put the box office in a precarious spot. But seeing even a more niche Taylor Swift release reach No. 1 is a sign that AMC and other distributors aren’t done with these event film experiments.