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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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There is a commercial following me around the internet. In the ad, a happy father is playing with his son on the beach while Mom is documenting it all on her brand-new Google Pixel 8 phone. Dad lifts the boy and gently tosses him a foot or so into the air. Mom, quick with the shutter, captures her giggling son at the apex of his flight. In the next frame, Mom clicks a button on her phone labeled “Magic Editor,” which allows her to isolate the boy on her screen and effortlessly drag him higher into the air and farther from Dad’s outstretched arms. With another tap, she adds contrast to the washed-out sky in the background, making the clouds pop. The boy is now soaring against an iridescent sky. A good shot has become a great one.

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.

That’s because our camera rolls—and the thousands of photos they contain—serve as a diary. They’re a personal archive that helps us make sense of the past. When my beloved first dog, Peggy, passed away in May, I spent weeks scrolling through a mosaic of reddish-brown fur on my camera roll. Many of these photos were not very good. They were blurry, with Pegs halfway out of frame as I tried to wrangle her into a pose. But each felt unmistakably real. In the deepest moment of my grief, I managed to find a forgettable picture that I didn’t remember taking, and the discovery knocked the wind out of me.

The camera roll also distorts our lives by preserving only certain parts of them. Losing my photos due to hard-drive debacles or a change in operating systems has, in the past, resulted in a peculiar wiping of my own memory. Those periods of my life, with no evidence to back them up, feel less vibrant. As I’ve written previously, constantly capturing the world around us can create a false impression: People sometimes mistake filing a shutter click away in an album for creating a real memory.

No wonder, then, that Google touts the tool’s ability to “bring your photos in line with how you remember a moment.” And, as The Verge’s Allison Johnson noted recently, Google Photos has also changed its motto from “Home for all your photos and videos” to “Home for all your memories.” That might sound meaningless, but the distinction between photos and videos and memories is a crucial one. Much like the Magic Editor photo of the tossed beach kid, memories are skewed recollections of something that happened. Perhaps you weren’t bathed in perfect golden-hour light the first time you held your oldest child in the hospital room, but that’s the way you recall the moment in your mind. Over time, memories blend sensory information into something that is between real and feel.

Now AI photo tools such as Magic Editor suggest that our camera rolls will evolve subtly, and perhaps we will too. Most concerns about AI irrevocably altering our world are hyper-focused on the future, but what if AI’s lasting impact is on the way we understand the past? The changes will likely feel small: Quick taps of the screen will mean fewer blinks, sneezes, and imperfections in pictures, and camera rolls that look a bit more like perfect Instagram grids. But the cumulative effect could feel bigger: a camera roll that is, in essence, a kind of virtual reality. Not that Google’s features are siphoning humanity out of photos that currently capture the world in all its messy detail: AI photo tools are a blatant appeal to vanity, a tacit admission that, in the battle between Instagram and reality, the former has won. The obsessions with photo-editing apps and even the standard custom of taking half a dozen snaps to get the right shot suggests that most people are not overly precious about fidelity.

But Magic Editor is merely one example of a more profound way that AI might alter our very concept of the past. Google Photos and Apple are both using artificial intelligence to package these altered photos into short, emotionally powerful narratives about our lives, sometimes set to music (I’m sure I’m not the first person to involuntarily tear up on an airplane at a photo montage called “Pet Friends”). If all of this sounds trivial, think back to the analog photo albums of your youth. These collections, usually lovingly curated by family or friends, help us make sense of our childhood and our life. Now that job is being outsourced to corporate algorithms, which present AI-touched-up content as memories.

Generative-AI tools will not wipe our memories or corrupt our sense of self, but the camera roll of the future could be missing the little bits of texture that allow us to recall certain moments as they really happened. So often, technology promises to decrease the friction in everyday life and to optimize how we present ourselves to the world. In the moment, a flawless AI photo is seductive, but the appeal can be lost when you’re looking at it years later. A perfect camera roll is not one that’s full of perfect photos.