Taylor Swift’s Box Office Domination Era Has Begun

This is the latest edition of the Movies Fantasy League newsletter. The drafting window for this season has closed, but you can still sign up to get the newsletter, which provides a weekly recap of box-office performance, awards nominations, and critical chatter on all the buzziest movies.

I think we can all agree that we’ve gone far too long into this fall movie season without placing Taylor Swift at the center of the discourse. No longer! Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is finally in theaters, box-office receipts are piling up, and fans are writhing around in quasi-religious agitation in a way that David Gordon Green could only have hoped to achieve in The Exorcist: Believer. That concert film will be our jumping-off point as we delve into which other movies might make a box-office impact before the year is out.

The Last Great American Box-Office Report

With a $92 million opening weekend, Swift provided her fans a place to experience their fave without having to watch NFL football. The Eras Tour packed in fans, owned social-media feeds, and set records. Highest-grossing concert film ever? Yup. Single-day ticket-sale record for AMC? Those Swifties know how to swarm a ticketing site. Biggest October opening weekend ever? Almost! Damn Joker.

(Aside from providing a much-needed boost to movie theaters across the nation, Swift has also delivered the first major influx of points to anyone participating in Vulture’s Movies Fantasy League. That $92 million opening weekend works out to 132 points for the film; by this coming weekend, the film will have cleared $100 million, earning another bonus.)

The rest of the weekend’s box office got a bit lost in Swift’s lavender haze, though there are a few movies that are poised to clear the $50 million threshold this weekend. The Exorcist: Believer got up to $44 million cumulatively in its second week, while the PAW Patrol movie and Saw X are up to $49 million and $41 million, respectively, in their third weekends. The Creator continues to lag far behind with $32 million.

It’s also worth noting that a few indie releases are on the board, though they’re in such limited release at the moment that they have yet to clear $1 million, so no MFL points yet for Anatomy of a Fall, Cat Person, Dicks: The Musical, or The Royal Hotel.

Blank Space (A.k.a. Box Office Outlook for the Rest of 2023)

It’s possible that The Eras Tour will mark the box-office high point of fall 2023, though there are a handful of movies that hope to make their own mark. The next few weekends look to be friendly to a continued run for Swift, unless Martin Scorsese and Sofia Coppola have their own fan armies ready to storm multiplexes for Killers of the Flower Moon and Priscilla.

One movie lurking out there, ready to make some kind of impact, is Universal’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, based on the video-game series of the same name, which is tracking in the $50 million range for its opening weekend. It would be something to see Josh Hutcherson return to the top of the box-office charts just a few weeks ahead of a Hunger Games spinoff (see below) — and a movie about a haunted Chuck E. Cheese is good fun for Halloween weekend.

The turbulent fortunes of superhero movies will once again be a topic of discussion when The Marvels opens on November 10. Early projections have the film tracking pretty low, in the $50 million–to–$75 million range, which would put it below recent worst-case-scenarios for the MCU like Eternals and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Waiting to eat into The Marvels’ second weekend is the reboot The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. I’m incredibly dubious about how much interest there is going to be for a Hunger Games without Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, but maybe people just really like the idea of children fighting to the death in an open-field tournament.

Disney’s latest animated feature, Wish, is hoping to utilize the Thanksgiving holiday to break the downward trend that animation has seen in the recent box office.

And then December sees the Aquaman sequel and its dark cloud of horrible buzz; Migration, the new animated movie from Illumination (i.e., the House That Minions Built); and the biggest box-office wild card of the year, Timmy Chalamet in Wonka. Can I see Wonka crashing and burning in a torrent of “Nobody wanted this!” fire? Sure. Can I see it becoming a reason-defying megahit that unites fans of Timmy, whimsy, Paddington, and Hugh Grant? Yes, I can.

So There’s Still This Strike

In all our excitement over the WGA negotiating its fair and equitable deal with the AMPTP, it seemed as though we all just assumed that the SAG-AFTRA strike would resolve soon thereafter. Thus far, that hasn’t been the case, and with talks faltering and the holiday season — that sacrosanct six weeks in which the entire industry shuts down between Thanksgiving and New Year’s and everybody’s like, Yeah, obviously, about it — quickly approaching, the strike’s possible impact on awards season is once again rearing its head. All of which is to say that Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders just got pulled from its December 1 release date since New Regency needs that film’s stars to be able to promote the film. That logic tracks well enough; if you’ve got a film starring Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Michael Shannon, Norman Reedus, Boyd Holbrook, and Mike Faist, you probably want to put a few of them through some junket interviews together at the very least. Of course, there’s also the fact that Beyoncé’s Renaissance concert movie is set to open on December 1 as well, so the strike might just be a good cover for New Regency to get its bike-riding boys out of Bey’s way.

For now, The Bikeriders is still planning to open at some point before the end of the year to qualify for awards, though given how muffled its reception was at the fall festivals, a punt to the spring wouldn’t be a huge surprise either. If so, the 397 MFL teams that drafted Bikeriders can join the Dune contingent in lamenting their bad luck.

Looking Ahead

For as much as we may have a laugh at Scorsese, Gen-Z Whisperer, the occasion of a new Marty movie is a cause for celebration. And while my spirit has been increasingly hardened against the idea that auteur-driven “good” movies can have any kind of chance at achieving box-office success anymore (Barbenheimer was a social-science confluence the likes of which we may never see again), I would be thrilled if the American public would prove me wrong. Come on, Swifties! What better way to come down from your Eras sugar high than three and a half hours spent reflecting on the evils of American empire-building at Killers of the Flower Moon??