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AMC/Variance’s “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” won’t have a particularly strong second weekend hold at the box office compared to other top films this year, but is still projected to make a decent $34 million this weekend after earning $10.4 million this past Friday.
Such a result would represent a 63% drop from the film’s $92.8 million opening weekend. The closest comparison to another top No. 1 film this year would be “John Wick: Chapter 4,” which dropped 61.6% from its $73.8 million opening this past spring.
Of course, any comparison to a traditional tentpole film would be inexact. While tentpole films try to appeal across demographics, Taylor Swift’s concert film appeals to a fan base that heavily skews towards a specific audience subset — female audiences under 35 — that faithfully turns out in droves.
The same could be said of any concert film, though Swift has by far the largest box office potential in the genre as “Eras Tour” will nearly double the previous concert film record with $132 million by the end of this weekend. That is money that theaters lost to next year when titles like Sony’s “Kraven the Hunter” and Warner Bros./Legendary’s “Dune: Part Two” moved their release to 2024 due to the ongoing actors’ strike.
Meanwhile, Paramount and Apple released Martin Scorsese’s critically acclaimed “Killers of the Flower Moon” this weekend, earning $9.4 million from 3,628 theaters on Friday as industry estimates project a $23.5 million opening weekend. Independent trackers projected an opening of around $25 million for the drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone and Robert De Niro, while Paramount projected $20 million-plus.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” carries a budget of $200 million financed by Apple, which also covered the marketing costs while Paramount handled theatrical distribution. Apple’s goals for the film will take months to achieve, as the distributor is hoping that a full theatrical release will build interest for the film when it is released on Apple TV+, something that will likely happen next year when it almost assuredly is nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
Theatrically, “Killers of the Flower Moon” is aiming for long legs, particularly among older audiences. With a run time of nearly three-and-a-half hours, even those interested in seeing the film will have to carve out a lot of time to go out and see it in theaters, so this $23 million opening may not represent a significant majority of the film’s core audience.
Some more good news for “Killers” is that audiences are embracing the film as much as critics, giving it an A- on CinemaScore. That’s the same grade that Scorsese’s Best Picture Oscar-winning film “The Departed” earned back in 2006.
