Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

Award-winning director Sam Wrench – known for his music documentary and live performance films about pop artists such as Billie Eilish, BTS, The Weeknd and Mary J. Blige – is bringing Taylor Swift’s wildly popular Eras Tour to the silver screen this fall.

This film is important to pay attention to because the tour, and this moment in Taylor Swift’s cultural superstardom, is practically unprecedented. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, this is a 20-month long tour which is projected to wrap up in November 2024 with 6 shows in Toronto whose tickets are selling for over $1,500 a seat.

This tour is poised to become the highest grossing pop music concert tour in history, and Sam Wrench has made a film about it.

This short trailer opens with several layers of industrial swooshes and risers as we zoom in from outside California’s SoFi Stadium at night. Over the next 12 seconds we hear the drum groove from Swift’s song “Cruel Summer,” accompanied by fans cheering and a voiceover by Taylor Swift, as the visuals cut rapid-fire through dozens of clips of Eras Tour concert footage. The sound design speeds up along with the visuals, as a sound like an accelerating propeller combined with a rising pitch builds us up to the cut to silence and black screen at 0:14.

This trailer has been edited to feature a disjointed version of “Cruel Summer.” Out of the cut to silence we hear (and see) Swift’s a cappella pickup out of the bridge into the third chorus of the song. The trailer gives us a taste of the live version of this song, with the clean studio polish replaced by the background sound of fans cheering and singing along, as if the film audience were also in attendance..

After the chorus finishes there is an unexpected 3-beat bar as the line “Are you ready for it?” is sung, followed by a jump backwards in the song to the bridge, at 0:42 in the trailer. However, this time after the bridge we transition back to the drum groove alone, as at the beginning of the trailer, leaving sonic space for Swift to give us the backstory of the tour concept in 10 seconds or less from her mossy grand piano, and that against more concert footage.

To finish we hear and see Swift singing the “Cruel Summer” hook one last time as the crowd goes wild. Then more risers lead us to the thump of an impact sound on the final still shot with the release date: Taylor Swift The Eras Tour is exclusively in theatres October 13.

• Jack Hui Litster