Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour will likely conclude as the highest grossing concert tour of all time, and now it’s its accompanying concert film has the potential for a similar distinction. The Eras Tour movie debuted this weekend with an estimated $95 to $97 million, according to the film’s distributor AMC Theaters.
Swift made history before the film had even hit theaters; its advance ticket sales alone were enough to put the Eras Tour movie among the highest-grossing concert films of all time, surpassing Justin Bieber’s 2011 concert movie Never Say Never, which has an all-time domestic box gross of $73 million, according to box office site The Numbers.
Domestically, the Eras Tour has is already the biggest concert film of all time per The Numbers; Bieber’s film brought in $73 million while Michael Jackson’s posthumous This Is It scored $72 million. With international numbers included, however, This Is It remains the biggest with $252 million, while Swift’s Eras Tour is at two and Never Say Never is third.
The film has received near-universal critical acclaim; in our review Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield called the movie “unlike anything else she — or anyone else — has done onscreen.
A $97 million opening weekend would place the Eras Tour film squarely within the top-10 openings of this year. The Eras Tour was originally going to release on Friday, October 13th, but last Wednesday Swift announced the film would hit the screens a day early due to “unprecedented demand,” Swift said when announcing the new release on her Instagram.
Swift sold tickets at $19.89 each (and $13.13 for children), references to her famed album and her lucky number, and as she so often does, Swift challenged the industry status quo and took the unconventional route of circumventing a movie studio and distributing the film herself. Beyonce, who has a concert film of her own primed for this December, took a similar approach.
The Eras Tour film hype had drawn comparisons to other major pop culture events at the theaters this year such as the Barbie film. As Rolling Stone previously reported, movie theater employees were preparing for how to handle rowdy Swifties ready to relive the concerts.
Swift attended a debut for her movie earlier this week at The Grove shopping center in Los Angeles, drawing a star-studded crowd of celebrities like Beyonce, Adam Sandler, Julia Garner and Maren Morris.
“This is a core memory for me and this tour? I’ve always had fun doing this,” Swift said at the premier. “I can’t believe music is my career. That’s crazy to me. I’ve always loved it. I’ve never had a fraction of the amount of fun on the Eras Tour before, ever.”