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The only group in the history of the Grammy Awards to have their golden gramophone revoked could pull off the ultimate redemption story if the stars align at next year’s broadcast. The upcoming Luke Korem-directed biopic Milli Vanilli has been submitted for consideration in the best film category at the awards slated to take place on Feb. 4 in Los Angeles more than three decades after the duo’s best new artist trophy was recalled by the Recording Academy.
“I actually had that vision four years ago when we began making this film,” Korem tells Billboard exclusively about the inspiration for the biopic that tells the full story of the duo’s rocket rise to fame and equally rapid descent into a music industry punchline; this writer appears in the film but was not involved in the production or marketing. “However, this time it’s not about whether or not they sang. This film is about the exploitation of two young artists – Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan – at the hands of a greedy music industry. I think a lot of artists and musicians can relate.”
Milli Vanilli is among 94 films vying for a nomination for best music film, including Oscar-shortlisted David Bowie doc Moonage Daydream and Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen: a Journey, A Song, as well as films about Boygenius, Miley Cyrus, Kelsea Ballerini, Duran Duran, U2, Foo Fighters and live movies about Ellie Goulding, Guns N’ Roses, Imagine Dragons, Kendrick Lamar, Sam Smith and many more.
In an exclusive new trailer for the film that debuted earlier this year at the Tribeca Festival in New York, surviving member Fabrice Morvan solemnly admits that he and late partner Rob Pilatus were “lying” to the public before offering up a maxim in his native French: “Lies are taking the elevators while the truth takes the stairs.”
Morvan says in the trailer that he knew that at some point the truth would emerge and the pair’s charade would be uncovered after the group quickly rose to the top of global charts with a string of late 1980s hits from their smash 1989 Girl You Know It’s True album. They scored three Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s (“Blame It on the Rain,” “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You” and “Baby Don’t Forget My Number”) in 1989 and won the best new artist Grammy in 1990 before it was revealed that they didn’t actually sing on any of their massive hits, which were performed by a group of anonymous studio musicians.
Morvan and Pilatus danced to the songs on stage and did press as Milli Vanilli, but during performances they pretended to sing over pre-recorded backing tracks.
“They were going to catch us at some point or another,” Morvan says in the clip, a realization that left the friends wondering what they would do when the house of cards collapsed as the weight of the lie pressed down on them, reaching its peak when the new artist award was repossessed nine months after the Feb. 1990 Grammys; it was the first, and so far only, time a Grammy has been rescinded.
The preview also features heartbreaking testimony from Pilatus’ adopted sister, Carmen Pilatus, who says the crush of attention became a problem “pretty quickly” for her brother, as he tried to balance his painful childhood feelings of isolation and otherness with the unfiltered love he got from screaming fans. “To be loved, finally, to be loved… but having to lie to the people who love and idolize him that was for him a huge problem,” she says in the film.
Trying to blot out the pain of the constant deceit, Morvan says he and Pilatus drowned their sorrows in drugs and alcohol to “numb out,” with Pilatus admitting in an interview taped shortly before his death at age 32 in 1998 of an accidental drug overdose that he had frequent blackouts because of his out-of-control substance use.
Korem says he spent more than three years on the film in an effort to “expose the pop music machine in a way that no film has ever done,” with a focus on recognizing what Milli Vanilli gave the world: “great entertainment… And what better way than a Grammy? It would be the perfect ending to this wild story.”
Morvan tells Billboard that today he’s glad people found out about the ruse orchestrated by reclusive German producer Frank Farian, who struck gold a decade earlier with the disco pop group Boney M., which was also fronted by a dancer who did not sing.
“When people saw headlines about Milli Vanilli, they just thought of Rob and Fab,” Morvan says. “But now when they think of Milli Vanilli, they think of Rob and Fab, the music industry that was behind them, the producers, and [former head of their American label, Arista Records] Clive Davis — everybody had a hand in it and was a major part of organizing this whole thing as opposed to people believing that Rob and I did everything.”
Without naming names, both men said it’s “common practice” for acts to lip synch today to recreate studio magic on stage, to make sure, as Morvan says, “that people aren’t disappointed by not hearing what they heard on the record or on the radio.”
And while Rob and Fab (briefly) enjoyed the high life and the spoils of fame, Korem says that the price of not singing on the records was higher than either man imagined. “This deception cost Rob his life and nearly destroyed Fab,” he says. “Think about that. Someone came along to these two kids and said, ‘let me make you a star,’ and they said yes. They took a bite of the apple, and the world crucified them for it. For what? For doing something The Monkees and others had done? For dancing and providing entertainment? It’s ludicrous.”
Watch the new trailer for Milli Vanilli (which begins streaming on Paramount+ on Oct. 24) below.
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Deadpool 3 director Shawn Levy has seen Taylor Swift‘s directing skills up close and he thinks the singer has the makings of a movie mogul. Swift, who has directed (or co-directed) the videos for her songs including “The Man,” “Me!” and the 10-minute mini-movie for the “All Too Well” has already said that she has a feature film in mind for her next trick, and Levy is here for it.
“Taylor has not consulted me about upcoming directing projects, but I think she has the makings of a hell of a director,” Levy told EW when the mag asked if Swift had asked him for tips about directing a feature after he co-starred as her dad in the “All Too Well” short film. While Levy could not talk about what it was like acting in the Swift-helmed short because of the ongoing Hollywood actor’s strike, he said the singer has an impressive vision behind the lens.
“That list is short. Taylor, the depth of her vision for how she wants a creative piece to be, whether it’s a lyric, a melody, a bridge, a concert tour, a video, it’s profound,” he said in compiling a two-womean roster of artists whose cultural impact is off the charts; the only other name on his list, by the way, is Beyoncé.
“It’s profoundly vivid, and she has the strength of her convictions,” Levy added in dubbing Swift a “generational voice and creative force,” before tying that vision to a philosophy espoused by three-time Oscar-winner Steven Spielberg.
“Spielberg was on the set of a movie he produced that I directed, called Real Steel, and I said to him, ‘How do you know it’s the right shot?’ His answer was, ‘The way you see it, that makes it right,’” Levy explained. “I feel like that’s something Taylor Swift has figured out really well, because that’s about trusting your instinct.”
Swift has won two MTV VMAs for best director, one for the “All Too Well” short film and the other for “The Man” video and in December Searchlight Pictures announced that Taylor is gearing up to direct her first feature-length film based on her original screenplay.
Before she steps behind the camera, Swift is likely to smash box office records this weekend following Thursday night’s opening of her Eras Tour concert movie, which experts predicted could easily soar above $100 million in grosses in its opening frame, instantly making it the highest-grossing music film of all time.
When it comes to the music of Sofia Coppola’s films, “There’s always a bit of impressionism,” says Thomas Mars, the lead singer of Phoenix — who also happens to be married to the director. Think of My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” scoring Scarlett Johanssen’s taxi ride through late-night Tokyo in Lost in Translation, Kirsten Dunst cavorting through a decadent young queen’s wardrobe as Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” blasts in Marie Antoinette or the haunting chords of Air lending a foreboding tone to 1970s U.S. suburbia in The Virgin Suicides.
And in Coppola’s latest film, Priscilla (out Nov. 3 from A24) — about when a teenage Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) and Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi) met — one moment in particular seems destined to join the canon of the director’s great needle drops: after Priscilla and Elvis’ first kiss, the resounding, viscerally recognizable trio of guitar chords of Tommy James and The Shondells’ “Crimson & Clover.”
“Sofia is really attuned to the grand majesty of popular music,” says veteran music supervisor Randall Poster, who shares music supervision credit on the film with Phoenix. “In a sense, ‘Crimson & Clover’ is as epic as Mozart or Beethoven — it encapsulates every adolescent emotion possible.”
In adapting Priscilla from Priscilla’s 1985 memoir, Elvis & Me, Coppola did use some of the historical music cues mentioned in it, such as a cover of Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” (which Phoenix plays variations of as the score throughout) and Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s.” But for the rest of the soundtrack, “I didn’t want it to sound corny, like some music of that era can to me,” Coppola says. A fan of producer Phil Spector, his sound “became a way to tie things together. I wanted to embrace the melodrama of strings and big production.”
Sometimes that meant nodding to Spector in unexpected ways: As the film opens, the orchestral psychedelics of Alice Coltrane’s “Going Home” fade into Spector’s trademark kick drums and lush strings — and the joltingly nasal voice of Joey Ramone covering The Ronettes’ “Baby I Love You” (a track from the Ramones’ Spector-produced End of the Century).
But many times during the film, silence is used to striking effect. As Mars points out, key synchs like “Crimson & Clover” needed some quiet preceding them. “We felt this will be a big moment, so we can’t have too much music before. To make sure these moments are highlighted, there’s a bit of negative space.” And silence was, in fact, a big part of the discussion among Coppola, her longtime editor Sarah Flack, Mars and Poster about how music would inform the telling of Priscilla’s story. Coppola has always been drawn to illuminating the interior lives of young women, and Priscilla, for much of the film, is alone — left at Graceland, away from her family, while her husband is off in the military or on film sets.
“She’s trying to fit in; she’s not sure where she is,” Mars says. “It takes time for her to get her life back, to make her own choices.” Emphasizing the stillness of her life without Elvis, and the noise and parties when he returns, was important. “I think those silences push you deeper into the movie, ultimately,” Poster says.
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Although Elordi magnetically portrays Elvis, the film is centered in Priscilla’s experience, and his music is almost entirely absent from it. Authentic Brands Group, the majority owner of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which controls approval of Elvis song usage, did not grant it to Coppola. But that meant “we had to make a weakness a strength,” Mars says. “In the end, it’s better that it’s more focused on Priscilla’s perspective.”
And it seems the film’s subject was pleased. At the movie’s Venice Film Festival showing, Priscilla embraced Coppola and wiped away tears during a standing ovation. “We haven’t talked specifically about the music, but she said, ‘You did your homework,’ ” Coppola says. “She felt it was authentic, which was so important to me.”
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
“Are you guys doing something?” Taylor Swift asked the members of *NSYNC on Sept. 12 while onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards, where the reunited boy band had just arrived to shrieks and presented Swift the best pop trophy. “I need to know what it is!” *NSYNC was back, and even pop’s biggest superstar was amped.
Justin Timberlake, JC Chasez, Lance Bass, Chris Kirkpatrick and Joey Fatone demurred at the time, but soon after the VMAs, *NSYNC announced “Better Place,” its first new song together in over two decades. The shimmering, falsetto-heavy disco-pop track was created for Trolls Band Together, the third installment in the hit animated film series in which Timberlake voices a main character, Branch, and has contributed hits to each of the first two Trolls movies.
“My excitement started way back in the early part of the year,” says Gina Shay, the producer/music supervisor for the films. That was when Timberlake sent her a demo of “Better Place,” designed to follow his Billboard Hot 100-topping smash “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” from the original Trolls film in 2016 and his SZA collaboration, “The Other Side,” from 2020’s Trolls World Tour.
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Shortly after sending the demo, Timberlake texted Shay that he felt inspired to reunite *NSYNC to record “Better Place.” “It was like dynamite was going off inside my brain,” Shay says. After all, *NSYNC — whose four studio albums have sold 27.9 million copies, according to Luminate, and scored turn-of-the-century smashes like “Bye Bye Bye” and “It’s Gonna Be Me” — hadn’t released music together since 2002.
And while Trolls Band Together focuses on a boy band reunion, Shay says that the plot had been locked in long before any talk of an *NSYNC comeback. “The movie’s story has been solid for about four years,” she says, “so it was just that perfect confluence of a song to reunite *NSYNC and to carry the narrative.”
Although Shay says that coordinating all five members’ schedules with their individual teams “took a little time to sort through,” “Better Place” came together rather seamlessly once the quintet was fully on board. After *NSYNC announced its reunion at the VMAs and unveiled “Better Place” on Sept. 29, Shay hopes that the song will become ubiquitous prior to the Nov. 17 release of Trolls Band Together — but however high it climbs, she’s glad that the film franchise could play a role in the reformation of a pop behemoth like *NSYNC.
“I’m so glad we were able to do this for the fans,” she says. “It has been a mix of love, pandemonium and wish fulfillment.”
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The Hunger Games films are no stranger to haunting musical moments that produce real-life hits, with six singles from four movies hitting the Billboard Hot 100 — including top 20 hits for Taylor Swift and even Jennifer Lawrence. When the prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes hits theaters on Nov. 17, a batch of new songs will take center stage thanks to Rachel Zegler, who delivers a nuanced portrayal of a nomadic balladeer thrown into a dystopian fight to the death.
Almost two years after winning a Golden Globe for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake, Zegler is preparing to show audiences she can deliver gritty country-folk just as deftly as Broadway classics. To ensure the music of the film convincingly conjured her character’s Appalachia-esque milieu, Lionsgate tapped Nashville mainstay Dave Cobb to put melodies to lyrics penned by franchise author Suzanne Collins. Cobb, a nine-time Grammy Award winner, is primarily known for working with country artists including Brandi Carlile and Chris Stapleton. But he has produced music for major films along the way such as A Star Is Born and Elvis — and his latest Hollywood project presented a new challenge.
What about this opportunity made you say yes?
One of the things that was so attractive about working on this film [is that] I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a more intelligent person in my life than Suzanne Collins. She’s an absolute genius. Suzanne telling me the impetus of the story had me captivated. I’m a history buff — I would teach history if I wasn’t in music — and everything in this film, everything she has written for Hunger Games, is derived from real history. She sent me the lyrics, and I had to make them feel like turn-of-the-century, timeless classics. That’s a very hard thing to do.
The songs have a lived-in rawness to them. How did you achieve that?
The big thing for me was to get the ability to be completely unorthodox. We had this crazy idea to come down to my hometown of Savannah, Ga., and rent an old mansion and record in that. So we went to this 200-plus-year-old house, and the sound is very Alan Lomax. Lomax, whom I’m very influenced by, used to go around and capture people on their front porch. It was the real, genuine, authentic article of whatever he was [recording], so we went for that. With all the creaks in the walls, you can hear the history in the recording — it wasn’t like a clinical studio. The old microphones we used looked like they’d been under a bed for 75 years.
Dave Cobb
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And what about the band?
I brought in ringers who I thought were great musicians. Molly Tuttle played a big part — she played the guitar of [Zegler’s character] Lucy Gray. I found this ’30s Gibson that I brought down, and she played on that. I showed it to [director] Francis [Lawrence], and he used it in the film: It’s the one she’s actually playing in the film. It wasn’t just a regular acoustic guitar — it has character. That was a big part of making this come to life. There’s bleed between the bass going into the fiddle going into the banjo. It’s just absolute chaos in a way that makes things dangerous.
Did you work closely with Zegler, coaching her on how to approach the material?
I made the music before the film was made, and Rachel is such an incredible talent that she ended up singing everything live, which we were hoping she would do. She’s so naturally gifted — it was effortless for her. She can sing anything.
Do you have a favorite musical moment in the film?
There’s a song on [the soundtrack] I love called “Pure As the Driven Snow.” Rachel has this beautiful, almost ’30s American voice. The way she sings the last line of that song is so stunning.
This story originally appeared in the Oct. 7, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In a preview of an upcoming primetime special, Jada Pinkett Smith reveals that she and husband Will Smith have been separated since 2016 after the couple became “exhausted with trying” to keep their marriage together. The interview with Hoda Kotb, “Jada’s Story — An NBC News Special” will air on Friday (Oct. 13) at 8 p.m ET on NBC.
Pinkett Smith is doing press to promote her upcoming memoir, Worthy (out Oct. 17), in which she describes the couple’s split for the first time, writing that they have been living “completely separate lives” for more than seven years. Jada told Kotb that it was not a divorce “on paper,” but it was definitely a divorce in their minds, even as the couple continued to present a united public front.
The actress how said she considers herself a “straight talker,” told Kotb that the couple were just “not ready yet” to share their secret. “Still trying to figure out between the two of us how to be in partnership,” she said in an excerpt of the interview released by NBC. “In regards to how do we present that to people? We hadn’t figured that out.”
Walking through her Baltimore home town, Pinkett Smith said the relationship broke down for a lot of reasons. “I think by the time we got to 2016, we were just exhausted with trying,” she said. “I think we were both kind of just still stuck in our fantasy of what we thought the other person should be.” Though Pinkett Smith said she considered a legal divorce, she could never go through with it because she made a promise that there would never be a reason for the couple to split.
“‘We will work through whatever,’” she told herself. “And I just haven’t been able to break that promise.”
Jada and Will were married in 1997, with son Jaden born a year later, followed by daughter Willow in 2000. Pinkett Smith said they are still living apart and at present do not plan on getting divorced.
The couple has been dogged by rumors for years, including a persistent one that they were in an “open marriage,” a topic Pinkett Smith addressed in 2013 during a HuffPo Live event when she said, “I’ve always told Will, ‘You can do whatever you want as long as you can look at yourself in the mirror and be okay.’ Because at the end of the day, Will is his own man. I’m here as his partner, but he is his own man. He has to decide who he wants to be and that’s not for me to do for him. Or vice versa.”
After backlash, Pinkett Smith responded in a Facebook post in which she said, “Will and I BOTH can do WHATEVER we want, because we TRUST each other to do so. This does NOT mean we have an open relationship… this means we have a GROWN one.” Those persistent rumors popped up again in 2020 when Pinkett Smith, 52, invited singer and family friend August Alsina on to her “Red Table Talk” show to discuss what she dubbed as a romantic “entanglement” that occurred while she and Smith were briefly separated.
The shocking revelation of the Smith’s separation has added heft in light of her Oscar-winning estranged husband storming the stage at the 2022 Oscars and violently smacking Chris Rock across the face after the comedian made a joke about Pinkett Smith’s bald hairstyle; the actress suffers from alopecia, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.
Smith famously yelled “keep my wife’s name out your f–in’ mouth!” during an incident that got the star banned from all Academy events for 10 years after he collected a best actor Oscar later in the night for his work in King Richard.
In a People magazine interview promoting the book, Pinkett Smith said she hasn’t talked to Rock since the March 27, 2022 incident. “[Do I have] any desire to talk to Chris? Here’s my desire: I just hope that all the misunderstanding around this can be cleared up and that there can be peace,” she told the magazine.
“I talk about this in the book, I think that there might be some misunderstanding between Chris and I as far as the 2016 Oscars,” she said of Jada’s support for the 2016 #OscarsSoWhite protest that called for a boycott of the show over the lack of Black representation in its nominations that year; Pinkett Smith lent her support after Will was not nominated for his role in the football drama Concussion. “I that he might’ve taken offense, which I meant no harm in offending. That wasn’t my intention. But I do think that there’s a big misunderstanding there.”
Host Rock made some jokes about Pinkett Smith in his monologue that year and in his Selective Outrage stand-up special earlier this year he said that she had suggested back then that he should give up the hosting slot out of solidarity with the movement. She now says she may not have recognized the “level of pressure [Chris] might’ve been under” back then and that she should have called him to see how he was feeling.
Pinkett Smith said Rock later called her to apologize, which allowed her to say she was sorry to him as well. “So I actually thought that we were good, that the hatchet was buried between us. And we hadn’t talked since then, until 2022 came,” she said, revealing that right after the slap Rock came down to the front of the stage during a pause in the broadcast and tried to apologize to her. Pinkett Smith also told People that at first she thought the stage slap was “a skit” before realizing that the violence was real.
“He said, ‘I didn’t mean you any harm.’ I said, ‘I can’t talk about this now, Chris. This is some old s—,’” she recalled of what Rock said to her after the attack. “I thought this was [about] the Oscar 2016 and … their stuff that they had before I even came into the picture in the late ‘80s. I’ve got to leave that to Will and Chris to talk about, but they got their stuff for sure.”
From where Pinkett Smith was sitting, she said she couldn’t tell if 6’2″ Smith had struck the comedian, “because, number one, I’d seen Will in the boxing ring with pro fighters — Will’s a heavy-hitter. So when Chris moved, it looked like he ducked or he missed the shot. And when he continued to stand, and then when he continued to walk down to the end of the stage, I was like, ‘There’s no way. There’s no way that Will hit him.’”
It wasn’t until later, she said, that she realized the smack was real. “I was in as much of a fog as anybody else in that room that night,” she said.
Adding even more drama to the story, Pinkett Smith dropped yet another bombshell, saying that Rock once asked her out on a date during a period when there were reports that she and Will were getting divorced.
“And this particular summer, Chris, he thought that we were getting a divorce,” she said of the nearly annual reports of trouble in the Smith marriage. “So he called me and basically he was like, ‘I’d love to take you out.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He was like, ‘Well, aren’t you and Will getting a divorce?’ I was like, ‘No. Chris, those are just rumors.’ He was appalled. And he profusely apologized and that was that.”
The Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour concert movie is on track to open as the top-grossing music concert film ever. The movie chronicling the singer’s sold-out, career-spanning 2023 stadium tour doesn’t open until Oct. 13, but according to The Hollywood Reporter, it has already racked up advance ticket sales of $100 million a week before […]
Beyoncé is going to the movies. The singer debuted the trailer for her upcoming concert documentary, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, on Sunday night (Oct. 1) during the final stop on her Renaissance World Tour in Kansas City, MO.
“When I am performing, I am nothing but free,” Bey says in voiceover at the outset of the two-minute trailer. The clip opens with the singer casually walking to stage while flashing a peace sign, stretching pre-show with her kids — including rehearsing with back up dancer/eldest daughter Blue Ivy Carter — and having a cocktail in the green room.
The two hour and thirty minute unrated film is due to hit screens in the U.S., Canada and Mexico on Dec. 1, with more global dates to be announced later. The singer captioned an Instagram post featuring the trailer with the cheeky warning, “Be careful what you ask for, ’cause I just might comply.”
The official description of the movie says that it: “accentuates the journey of RENAISSANCE WORLD TOUR,, from its inception, to the opening in Stockholm, Sweden, to the finale in Kansas City, Missouri. It is about Beyoncé’s intention, hard work, involvement in every aspect of the production, her creative mind and purpose to create her legacy, and master her craft. Received with extraordinary acclaim by International and U.S. media alike, Beyoncé’s outstanding performance during Renaissance World Tour created a sanctuary for freedom, acceptance, and shared joy. Its maximalist production welcomed more than 2.7 million fans from around the world, who travelled across oceans to enjoy Club Renaissance. Now, millions of moviegoers will get caught up in the Joy Parade, the monumental dance party that celebrates everyone’s right to be themselves, close to home.”
The trailer hints at the joy, hard work and glamour of life on the road with Bey, from shots of her wearing a surgical mask while looking ill, to one in which the singer struts in a leather designer outfit to a waiting helicopter while explaining, “my goal for this tour was to create a place where everyone is free… and no one is judged.” Husband and No. 1 fan, Jay-Z, makes a cameo as well, pumping his fist and smiling from the crowd amid glimpses of the massive stage production, mind-bending costume and lighting effects and the couple’s twins, Rumi and Sir.
The Renaissance tour is Beyoncé’s biggest to date, with grosses expected to cross the $550 million mark. Tickets for the movie — priced at $22 — are on sale now, with Deadline reporting that AMC is releasing the film in partnership with Beyoncé’s film production company and record label, Parkwood Entertainment. Like Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour concert film, AMC will run the Renaissance movie on the weekends (Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday) for at least four weeks.
Bey’s movie follows on the heels of her 2019 Netflix doc Homecoming, which chronicled the singer’s 2018 Coachella headlining set, as well as her 2013 HBO movie, Life Is But a Dream, a hybrid live performance and video diary project, and her 2009 I Am… Yours: An Intimate Performance at Wynn Las Vegas.
Watch the trailer below.
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Besides flexing his creativity on the hardwood, NBA marksman Stephen Curry is quickly etching a lane for himself on the film side alongside his Unanimous Media co-founder Erick Peyton. Next up, the duo are producing an upcoming documentary on the Bay Area legend Mac Dre. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, […]
Taylor Swift is taking the Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour concert movie across the planet. The singer announced on Tuesday morning (Sept. 26) in an Instagram post that the doc about her record-setting Eras Tour will screen in more than 100 countries around the world.
“The tour isn’t the only thing we’re taking worldwide…….” Swift wrote alongside a globe emoji. “Been so excited to tell you all that The Eras Tour concert film is now officially coming to theaters WORLDWIDE on Oct 13! Tickets available now at www.TSTheErasTourFilm.com or on your local theaters website!”
The extensive list of countries slated to screen the film beginning on Oct. 13 includes: Albania, Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Bermuda, Colombia, Cyprus, Ecuador, Fiji, Gibraltar, Iceland, Italy, Kosovo, Luxembourg, Malta, Mauritius, Moldova, Nicaragua, Peru, Poland, Serbia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Ukraine, Venezuela and Zambia, among many others; the film is also slated to hit Brazil, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Macau, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey and Vietnam on Nov. 3. Tickets for most of the international screenings outside N. America will go on sale on Sept. 26.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, AMC Theatres, which is handling the release in the U.S., is also serving as the international distributor of the movie, with AMC and partners working on agreements with movie theater operators who represent more than 7,500 cinemas around the world.
Swift announced earlier this month that the 2 hour and 45 minute concert film will open in the U.S., Canada and Mexico beginning Oct. 13, with the movie expected to play in more than 4,000 theaters in the three territories The initial roll-out, of course, set one-day sales records for AMC with $26 million in the first 24 hours of on-sale and early projections suggest that it could open to $75 million or more, which would instantly make it the top-grossing music concert film ever.
To accommodate the demand, every U.S. AMC Theatre will run the Eras movie at least four times per day on Thursdays, Friday, Saturdays and Sunday. In an Easter egg reference to Swift’s favorite numbers, tickets for the film are priced at $19.89 plus tax for adults and $13.13 for children and seniors plus tax (except for AMC’s branded premium large-format screens.) The film will be available in AMC theaters in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, with tickets on sale now here and here. Super Swifties can also splurge to book a private screening of the movie.
See Swift’s announcement below.
