Movie theater employees have just come off of one of the biggest summers of film releases in recent years. Between Greta Gerwig’s and Christopher Nolan’s , they have witnessed endless seas of hot pink outfits and film bros dying to mansplain World War II. Meanwhile, employees working at stadiums were spending their summer encountering a similar scene — except their audiences were dressed in the vision of each studio album, and they were only interested in over-explaining potential easter eggs hidden in the high-scale production of .
But soon, these two worlds will collide.
On Friday, Oct. 13, the Sam Wrench-directed concert film
will premiere in more than 4,000 theaters across North America. It’s no secret that Swift runs one of the tightest ships of any pop star working today. The sheer magnitude and professionalism of her celebrity has meant that, for the duration of the stadium tour’s first leg, Swifties adopted an unspoken behavioral contract: There would be no throwing items onstage to get her attention or blocking other attendees’ views with giant signs that she couldn’t possibly stop to read.
In a post-COVID concert space, the tour created an illusion of normalcy night after night — one where fans traded friendship bracelets and sang together in a harmonic, kumbaya union of musical souls instead of pelting her with
, , or .
This is probably why Swift felt safe encouraging them to treat the tour film in theaters to an actual concert. “Eras attire, friendship bracelets, singing and dancing encouraged,” the singer wrote on when announcing the film. But the theater employees tasked with handling the as the movie runs for a minimum of four showtimes per day, four days a week, at AMC theaters (and select other chains) have already spent months dealing with the decline of manners in their own industry — like the theaters that are left ravaged with trash, attendees scrolling and filming during screenings, and others talking through films enough to sufficiently disrupt the people around them.
They don’t have the same authority as someone like Swift, and as the release of Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour approaches, they’re growing weary of the friction the increasingly fractured concepts of movie theater and concert etiquette might create when combined.
