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One week ago, Taylor Swift’s concert film, The Eras Tour, opened in theaters across the country. Within days, it had become the most successful concert film of all time, grossing more than $90 million in North America on its first weekend. I spoke with my colleague David Sims, who covers culture for The Atlantic, about what the success of the movie says about the future of movie theaters, and what made right now such a good time for Swift to release it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Biden’s inflection point Another domino falls in Georgia. You can learn to be photogenic.

Hard to Repeat

Lora Kelley: There has been a lot of dire news about the future of movie theaters in recent years. Are blockbuster theatrical releases for movies such as Barbie and The Eras Tour a sign that theaters are on the up again?

David Sims: These hit movies are a sign of rebound. There has been a general sense of positivity regarding ticket sales lately, especially after sales reached historic lows early in the pandemic. Barbie and Taylor Swift, in particular, appeal to young people, whom Hollywood is obsessed with getting into the theater.

Audiences are responding to stuff that is a little different from the cinematic universes and franchises that Hollywood has been very reliant on for the past 10 years. Interest is declining in superhero movies and long-running franchises. But rather than that meaning the end of big ticket sales in Hollywood, other movies are filling the gap.

Lora: What can a movie theater offer that streaming cannot?

David: The Eras Tour could easily have been released as a TV series on a streaming service. But Taylor Swift, quite smartly, seemed to realize that the group experience is very crucial to her fandom—We’re all in it together; we all get all the references; we understand the contours of the tour and the eras—and that this would be best experienced in a movie theater. The magic of the theater experience is always going to be that you’re in a dark room with lots of other people who are enjoying it, and you all enjoy it together.

Taylor Swift partnered with the theater chain AMC, which is basically functioning as a distributor. If you distribute through a studio, it takes a large cut of your money. Instead, Swift went to AMC and said, Why don’t you just put this in theaters directly, and I’ll get about 57 percent of ticket sales, which is a good deal. The amount of pure profit you can make with a successful movie remains staggering. Releasing something on streaming or home video, you can make money. But there’s a reason movie-theater releases have been the primary model for 100 years.

Lora: Taylor Swift is obviously extremely famous, and she’s proved skilled at mobilizing her own following. Is her approach to this movie replicable, or is this a one-off phenomenon?

David: Taylor Swift is possibly peerless in terms of universal recognition and cross-generational appeal. In three days, Eras became the most successful concert film ever made. But I don’t think this project is a one-off. There are other celebrities who have great means who can try things like this. The concert film of Beyoncé’s tour, Renaissance, is coming out in theaters on December 1. Her tour is over, so it’s more of a capper. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift has a tour that is still happening—it’s hard to go see it, and it’s expensive, but it’s still going on.

Concert movies do not usually do very well at the box office. But for musicians, there’s basically no downside to it. You are paying very little to film your concert. You put it in theaters, and then you get the money. And people who couldn’t see your concert live get to access it, which is nice.

Also, Hollywood has been on strike for almost six months. A lot of movies have been cleared out, because the striking actors can’t promote them. Taylor Swift’s team came in and basically said, If we put out a movie right now, we will be the biggest story of the month in cinema. The timing part of this may be hard to repeat.

Related:

Taylor Swift did what Hollywood studios could not. The 22 most exciting films to watch this season

Today’s News

Jim Jordan lost his third vote for speaker of the House and is no longer the party’s nominee. President Joe Biden is requesting $106 billion in emergency funding from Congress primarily to aid Israel and Ukraine, as well as for U.S. border security. Kenneth Chesebro became the second former Trump lawyer to plead guilty in the Georgia-election case.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Louise Glück wrote with authority, Emma Sarappo explains. The poet loved using myth, history, and legend in her verse Work in Progress: Turns out you can tame inflation without triggering a recession, Rogé Karma writes. Will the Federal Reserve accept the good news?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Guy Le Querrec / Magnum

AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories

By Charlie Warzel

Google’s latest Pixel phones, the ad wants you to know, come standard with a suite of new generative-AI photo-editing tools. With a few taps, you can move people around in the frame like the mom does with her son, or use the “Magic Eraser” to get rid of a pesky photobomber. “Best Take,” a feature that snaps a bunch of images at once and isolates each person’s face, allows you to merge photos so that everyone appears to be perfectly looking at the camera at the same time. Combined, these features mostly reflect the photographer’s intent at the time of capture. But is the end result … real?

Of course, there’s nothing particularly scandalous about editing a family photo. Anyone sufficiently trained in Photoshop has been able to do something similar for decades; likewise, smartphones and photo apps have long offered the ability to touch up a picture until it’s transformed, even “yassified.” Yet tools like Magic Editor will likely soon become standard across devices, making it dramatically easier to perfect our photos—and thus to gently rewrite small details from our lives.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Guy Le Querrec / Magnum

Listen. The late, great American composer Carla Bley’s 1977 record, Dinner Music.

Watch. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s best-selling Killers of the Flower Moon (in theaters) explores the rot beneath the myth of American exceptionalism.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Three down, 16 to go.

With the attorney Kenneth Chesebro agreeing to plead guilty to a single felony today, the Fulton County, Georgia, racketeering case against Donald Trump and others for attempting to steal the 2020 election has one more conviction and one fewer defendant.

As part of the deal, Chesebro pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to file false documents. He’ll pay $5,000 in fines, write an apology letter, and face five years of probation. Perhaps most important, he agreed to testify in upcoming trials. Chesebro faced seven counts that portrayed him as central to a scheme to send slates of false electors to Washington, D.C., after the 2020 election and to efforts to disrupt the certification of the election on January 6, 2021, in Congress. He had argued that he was merely offering legal opinions to clients. Chesebro’s plea came on the same day that jury selection had begun in his case, and one day after the attorney Sidney Powell took a somewhat similar plea deal. Scott Hall, an Atlanta bail bondsman, pleaded guilty in September.

[David A. Graham: What Sidney Powell’s deal could mean for the Fulton County case against Trump]

The question for anyone watching the proceedings now is whether these pleas portend the sort of falling-dominos scenario that prosecutors hope for in a big racketeering case like this, in which low-level defendants decide to cut their losses and aid prosecutors in convicting the biggest names—in this case, a group including Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer John Eastman, and the former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark.

Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University who has closely followed the case, cautioned against expectations of a flurry of pleas now. But he told me that the agreements will force other defendants to think carefully about their choices.

“Do you want to drag it out and risk being lumped in with Donald Trump and the other top-tier people in this alleged racketeering scheme?” he said. “Are [defendants] willing to take the deals of the kind that Powell and Chesebro took, or are they going to fall on their swords for Donald Trump and go down with him?”

[David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture]

This week’s pleas appear to be a win for all parties. Chesebro and Powell both got fairly lenient sentences and, as first offenders, can have their convictions wiped from the record if they comply with the terms of the deals. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, meanwhile, scored two convictions and will now be able to draw on testimony from two people who were deeply enmeshed in the paperwork coup.

The pleas also spare all parties the rigamarole of a trial. Chesebro and Powell were the only two defendants who had requested a speedy trial under state law; others preferred more time to mount a defense. Now neither has to deal with the stress—and legal bills—of a trial. Nor do Willis and her team have to go through the exercise and risk revealing their strategy before the other defendants go on trial, which is expected sometime next year. This might help explain why both Chesebro and Powell got what many observers feel were favorable deals.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump—a guide]

“It was an open-ended question as to what the district attorney was willing to do for them in terms of a deal, and where the district attorney saw them in the pecking order [of defendants],” Kreis told me. “It’s clear to me now that the D.A. sees them as linchpins, and they want them to testify.”

What’s not clear is what exactly Chesebro might testify about. Unlike Powell, he doesn’t have much of a public profile, and didn’t spend time in front of cameras. In fact, he was one of the last witnesses to testify to the House committee investigating the 2020 election subversion, because investigators took time to chase him down in Puerto Rico. A quiet man and reputedly a skilled lawyer, he attended Harvard Law School, was a protégé of the prominent liberal legal mind Laurence Tribe, and worked for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign before getting involved in conservative legal causes starting around 2016, including working with Eastman to challenge birthright citizenship.

[David A. Graham: The paperwork coup]

Given that Chesebro has been described as a key architect of the false-elector scheme, he could presumably speak to the actions of the major players, perhaps even Trump’s. But Chesebro’s deposition for the House committee gives few hints of what he might be able to divulge. He said that his main contacts on the campaign included the close Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, and that he had spoken with Giuliani only once or twice. But in most cases, he invoked both the Fifth Amendment and attorney-client privilege to avoid giving answers, including about whether he had any direct communication with Trump.

That will be different if and when he is called to testify in Fulton County. The judge in the case has already ruled that attorney-client privilege does not apply to some of Chesebro’s communications under an exception that covers the commission of crimes, and having pleaded guilty, Chesebro can’t cite his right against self-incrimination. His role, instead, will be to incriminate others.