2023 market prediction: Taylor Swift keeps market on track for $9.5 billion

September 7, 2023

After Barbie saved the Summer, will Taylor Swift save the Fall?

The announcement of Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour was a literal stop-the-presses moment for our market prediction update. Significant early bookings and online buzz caused Universal to move Exorcist: The Believer a week earlier, to October 6, and those moves upended our predictions for October. Our model says Eras should be a $70-million movie, but, after just half a day, our audience buzz adjustment nearly doubled that number when our analysis was run. Like Barbie before it, this is a movie that has cultural phenomenon written all over it, and early ticket sales suggest an opening weekend closer to $100 million than the $51 million we’re currently predicting. We should have a clearer picture in our next report.

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The arrival of Eras makes a measurable difference to our market prediction for 2023, which was going to tick down this month. Warner Bros.’ decision to move Dune: Part 2 into 2024 knocked about $190 million off the expectation for the year, and only some new release announcements and increased audience interest in other Fall films was keeping the monthly drop in our prediction to around $100 million. Now the prediction is going to hold steady at $9.5 billion for the year.

The list of movies with the biggest influence on our prediction is predictably headed by Taylor Swift, but Barbie has also continued to track ahead of the model’s expectations over the last month, and it is now pretty much a lock for the highest-grossing film of the year. The main disappointment in August was Blue Beetle, which continued the weak run for the DC Universe.

Overall, we saw a little backsliding in our measure of market strength during August, although that is probably caused more by the end of Summer than the intrinsic qualities of the new releases. After the long recovery from the pandemic in 2021 and the first half of 2022, we’re perhaps now seeing more of a natural seasonal variation with audiences peaking in the Summer, slumping in the Fall, and then rising again towards Thanksgiving and Christmas:

With only half a day of tracking to go on when we ran the analysis, it was very early to get a handle of the potential for The Eras Tour, but it is already heading our list of potential over-performers with an adjustment above 200%. The Creator is also continuing to generate strong buzz as we get to within a month of its release date.

Looking further ahead, March, 2024 is looking like a monster month now that Dune: Part 2 is being released on March 12. There’s plenty of time for movies to move though, and I have a hunch that we’ll see one or two of March’s releases move back to April or May. If the strikes continue much longer, some slippage among the Q1 films seems inevitable, with or without Dune’s move.

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Bruce Nash, bruce.nash@the-numbers.com

Filed under: Taylor Swift