Taylor Swift Eras Tour movie breaks presale records at AMC Theatres

By Eva Rothenberg, CNN

Taylor Swift's concert film has already broken theater records more than a month ahead of its October 13 release. AMC Theaters said Friday that the singer's Eras Tour concert movie "shattered records for single-day advance ticket sales revenue," with $26 million of tickets sold on Thursday.

It beat the previous record holder, "Spider-Man: No Way Home," which sold $16.9 million worth of tickets in one day ahead of its release in 2021, AMC said in a statement.

Swift's movie crushed the daily record less than three hours after tickets became available, prompting the theater chain to say that it will add extra showtimes where possible.

Movie theaters have been recovering from a pandemic-era audience slump, driven by summer blockbuster hits like "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer." ("Barbie" is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, which is owned by CNN's parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.)

But the ongoing Hollywood actors' and writers' strikes and the impasse with studio negotiations mean that the pool of movies making its way to theaters could dry up over the next year. While studios typically distribute movies to theaters, AMC is acting as the Eras Tour film distributor in what it called "the inaugural step of a new line of business for AMC Entertainment."