Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour has officially become the highest-grossing concert film of all time, surpassing Michael Jackson’s 2009 film Michael Jackson’s This Is It. With today’s box office tallies added to the total, Taylor Swift’s movie has exceeded $261.6 million globally, reports Variety. Comparatively, This Is It grossed $261.2 million in theaters.
Swift was already on track to break the record when The Eras Tour debuted, as the film brought in $126 million globally – the biggest opening weekend for a concert film ever. Directed by Sam Wrench, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour follows the pop star and her dancers onstage as she plays 40 songs from 10 albums, with no backstage or behind-the-scenes footage included. Tickets cost $19.89 for adults (an homage to Swift’s birth year and album of the same name) and $13.13 (her favorite number) for children under 12 and people over 60.
Instead of releasing the concert film in all theaters, Swift partnered with AMC Theatres—the world’s largest cinema chain—for a non-traditional release exclusively in their theaters. This allowed her to earn 57% of ticket revenue as a producer of the movie, with those individual theaters taking the majority of the rest.
“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 with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour concert film,” said AMC Chairman and CEO Adam Aron. “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.”
