Her impact in Hollywood has been Swift and merciless. Within weeks of announcing her concert documentary, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, would be getting an exclusive run in AMC Theatres, chaos reigned. Exorcists scuttled from release dates, friendship bracelets were made, and the movie business braced for impact. Christopher Nolan could see it coming from a mile away.
Two days before The Eras Tour made landfall, the Oppenheimer director warned studios that a shitstorm was coming their way. In conversation with producer Emma Thompson and American Prometheus author Kai Bird, Nolan warned, “Taylor Swift is about to show studios” the importance of movie theaters, despite hyper-fixation on getting their blasted streaming services off the ground.
“Taylor Swift is about to show the studios because her concert film is not being distributed by the studios. It’s being distributed by the theater owner, AMC, and it’s going to make an enormous amount of money,” the director said. “And this is the thing, this is a format, this is a way of seeing things and sharing stories, or sharing experiences that’s incredibly valuable. And if [the studios] don’t want it, somebody else will. So that’s just the truth of it.”
As is usually the case with these things, Christopher Nolan is right. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour made $104 million at the worldwide box office since its release last week, beating all studio releases over the weekend, and it will probably do the same this week. The studios won’t see a dime.
One thing Nolan doesn’t discuss is the tricky question of AMC Theatres distributing its movies. The 1948 Hollywood anti-trust case, which ended the studio system, established the Paramount Decree, preventing studios from vertical integration and forbidding them from owning distribution and exhibition. As a result, for the last 70 years, studios have abandoned movie theater ownership since it created an unfair marketplace where studios would control production, distribution, and exhibition. However, a federal judge ended that ruling in 2020 because the court found such rules were no longer needed.
Now, there’s nothing to suggest that AMC will start a whole studio in a reversal of the old system. Furthermore, Eras is a specialty release, a concert film, which has a far different production than a traditional narrative film. But strangely and without consequence, the biggest movie theater chain in the country moved into distribution. When the Paramount Decree ended three years ago, most assumed it would be Disney, for example, buying up movie theaters and getting back into distribution. Eras was AMC’s first distributed movie, and it already has another on the way: Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé.