If you somehow haven’t heard, it’s not exactly an ample time to produce and release a movie at the moment. Since May, the 2023 WGA writers strike has had movie and TV writers taking to the picket line to protest how studios compensate them in the streaming era, and in July, the SAG-AFTRA actors strike kicked off. Despite both strikes currently raging on, Taylor Swift, who is a SAG member herself, found a way to make her upcoming Eras Tour concert movie without causing a stir in the ongoing negotiations.
According to Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator of SAG-AFTRA, Taylor Swift went out of her way to make sure Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour met all of SAG-AFTRAs demands to film and produce a movie in Hollywood’s current landscape. As Crabtree-Ireland shared while attending last week’s Toronto International Film Festival (via Fortune):
She came to us and said she wanted to do this, but only if she could do it the right way under a union contract. And we said, that’s great. And so she fulfilled all the same criteria as anybody else and has an interim agreement for that production.
When Swift went directly to SAG-AFTRA to receive an interim agreement, she had to make sure her film met the union’s stipulations, which includes meeting demands such as giving crew members higher salaries and “more generous streaming residuals,” per the report. Additionally, because Taylor Swift: Eras Tour is a documentary concert film rather than a dramatic feature film, it got an additional pass by SAG-AFTRA to release and promote it.
Another particularly notable move the singer did for her Eras Tour movie was that instead of approaching one of the major studios, such as Disney (which she worked with before for her 2020 doc and concert film Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions), Swift funded the movie herself and worked with her own production company, Taylor Swift Productions. The movie reportedly cost her between $10 to $20 million to shoot at her Los Angeles shows at SoFi Stadium, and she is collaborating with AMC Theatres to distribute it to theaters across North America this October.
The early reaction to Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film has been a massive influx of ticket sales, which led the artist to break Spider-Man: No Way Home’s record for single-day advance ticket sales in just three hours. Early box office estimates for the movie also expect it will make $100 million in its first weekend, and it's likely to become the highest-grossing concert movie to ever be released domestically.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour hits theaters on October 13. You can stay up to date on other upcoming Taylor Swift releases here on CinemaBlend, including the highly-anticipated re-recorded version of 1989, which also comes out next month.
