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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?

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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.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The reckoning that is coming for Qatar Yes, the U.S. can afford to help its allies. If you ever speak in public, follow this advice.

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.

More than $9bn would be set aside for humanitarian assistance in Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza.

The significance of President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation last night was signaled in the opening sentence: “We’re facing an inflection point in history.”

What followed was a speech that may well define Biden’s presidency.

The proximate cause for the speech was Biden’s desire to urge Americans to stand with Israel in its war with Hamas and Ukraine in its war with Russia. The president is expected to ask Congress for emergency assistance to the two nations in a $100 billion spending package. But the speech was not primarily about money; it was about America’s teleology, about how Biden sees the role of the United States in a world that is fraying and aflame.

Biden used phrases loaded with meaning. America is “the arsenal of democracy,” he said, invoking a phrase from a 1940 speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in case that wasn’t clear enough, Biden said America is “the essential nation” and the “indispensable nation.” It “holds the world together,” Biden said. Israel and Ukraine are 1,200 miles apart. The conflicts are quite different; Ukraine is battling a world power, and Israel a terrorist organization. But Biden twinned the two conflicts, presenting the outcome of these wars as vital to America’s national security.

[Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business]

“History has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,” he said, while promising to keep American troops out of harm’s way. “They keep going. And the cost and the threats to America and the world keep rising.”

Biden displayed “a passion, emotion and a clarity that is usually missing from the president’s ordinarily flat and meandering speeches,” according to David Sanger of The New York Times. In an act of extraordinary solidarity, President Biden has traveled to both Israel and Ukraine in the midst of their wars. One gets the sense that Biden believes this isn’t just America’s moment; it is his moment. It is as if he has found his purpose.

President Biden’s speech illustrated the profound shifts we’re seeing in American politics and within the two major parties. The commander in chief Biden most sounded like was Ronald Reagan, using phrases such as “pure, unadulterated evil” to describe the actions of Hamas (Reagan described the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”) and “beacon to the world” to describe America (Reagan often described the United States as a “shining city on a hill”).  

Meanwhile Republicans have become the more isolationist party, deeply wary of America providing moral leadership in the world. In last fall’s midterm elections, well over half of voters for Republican candidates—56 percent—said the U.S. should take a less active role in world affairs.

[From the December 2022 issue: A new theory of American power]

It is the American right, much more than the American left, that is disparaging of NATO, critical of aid to Ukraine, and appeasement-minded toward Russia. Donald Trump—the dominant and defining figure in the GOP—has repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin, among other brutal dictators, holding Putin up as a model and, at various points, denigrating America in the process. He even sided with Russian intelligence over U.S. intelligence at a joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki.

And so it was a bit disorienting for some of us who are conservative and who were shaped by the Reagan era—and in my case, who worked as a young man in the Reagan administration—to see our foreign-policy principles championed last night not by the Republican Party but by the Democratic president, who spoke with impressive moral force and moral clarity. Our journey through the looking glass continues.

Ukraine destroys Russian attack helicopters as US pledges billions in aid

As his address to the nation from the Oval Office Thursday night underlined, President Joe Biden is expected to send a defense-appropriations request to Congress for perhaps as much as $100 billion to support Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and to improve U.S. border security. It’s a big request—and it will galvanize a debate about whether the United States is doing too much.

Existing critics of Ukraine aid are already complaining that to add an effort to resupply Israel will prove too crushing. Is that true?

Let’s carefully tally American resources and American commitments.

Thanks to its remarkable rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, the American economy will this year produce $27 trillion in goods and services. In the fiscal year that ended on September 30, the U.S. spent about $850 billion of that $27 trillion on national defense. That rounds out at a little more than 3 percent of GDP. That’s only about half of the burden of defense spending that the U.S. shouldered during the final decade of the Cold War.

[Franklin Foer: Inside Biden’s ‘hug Bibi’ strategy]

To date, aid to Ukraine has cost a fraction of that percentage. By mid-September, the total value of the aid provided to Ukraine by the U.S. amounted to about $75 billion. Nearly a third of that sum (about $23 billion) was the value of old equipment from Pentagon stockpiles, material that was on its way to becoming obsolete anyway. The remainder included funding U.S. government operations to support Ukraine—training, logistics, and so on—and direct assistance to the Ukrainian government.

If the president now asks for another $75 billion over the next two years, that will represent about a 4 percent share of the defense budget for that period—or roughly one-tenth of one penny for every dollar of national output. The United States should be able to cope.

And what about the Israeli piece of this budget request?

In normal years, U.S. assistance to Israel is worth about $3 billion. Almost all of that is spent by Israel to buy U.S.-made weapons and equipment. Israel is reportedly requesting an emergency supplement of $10 billion—in the larger scheme of things, a fraction of a fraction.

Nor will aid to Israel compete with the needs of Ukraine. Ukraine wants heavy equipment from the U.S. to fight conventional land battles. Kyiv needs fighter jets, tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles, and ammunition, ammunition, and more ammunition. According to a senior Pentagon source, the Israeli emergency request involves very different items from the U.S. inventory: principally, precision-guided munitions for Israel’s air force, components for its Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, and intelligence resources and advisers for its hostage-situation response. Israel is receiving some fighting vehicles and artillery shells, too, but on a completely different scale from anything Ukraine requires. Ukraine needs about 1.5 million shells a year; Israel wants a few thousand more shells on hand in case Hezbollah starts shooting from the Lebanon hills. Blasting away in Gaza would be brutal and futile.

The critics of American military-aid spending also grumble that its partners do not contribute enough. That image some Americans have of free-loading allies is false.

Total European Union contributions to Ukraine are roughly double the total of U.S. commitments. EU countries are providing many weapons systems, including eventually some two dozen F-16 fighters. They are also covering most of the cost of sustaining the Ukrainian economy.  

[Casey Michel: Make Russia pay]

Alongside the EU, the United Kingdom has spent $5.6 billion on military assistance to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. Japan’s multiyear commitment—mostly economic and humanitarian—will add up to about $7 billion. The Canadian commitment to Ukraine will total about $7 billion over the years 2022–26.

Aside from all of this, the U.S. still has spare capacity, and can deliver more inventory to Ukraine without any risk to its own national security. Of the 2,200 F-16 aircraft purchased by the United States since the 1970s, fewer than 900 still remain in service. The Air Force would dearly like to retire and replace 125 of those 900. Donating those 125 to Ukraine would accelerate the Air Force’s wished-for modernization programs.

Costs, of course, have to be measured against benefits. The money to Ukraine is buying a powerful reinforcement of peace in Europe and across the world. The money to Israel will buy a similar deterrent to rogue aggression in the Middle East.

President Biden issued a one-word caution to Hezbollah and Iran about exploiting Hamas’s aggression against Israel: “don’t.” That warning has been bolstered by sending two carrier groups and a deployment of Marines to the region. Biden’s admonition has even more force because of what the Iranians have seen in Ukraine: a global alliance defending a democratic ally in defiance of Russia’s energy embargoes, nuclear blackmail, and disinformation warfare.

Some in the U.S. foreign-policy community harbor a fantasy that the U.S. can enhance its credibility with China by abandoning Ukraine. (One such dreamer, Elbridge Colby, was treated to a glowing profile in Politico recently.) This is like suggesting that a business can improve its credit by defaulting on some of its debts. Ukraine’s self-defense has delivered a needed check to authoritarian aggressors all around the world.

[David Frum: What Ukraine needs now]

Democracy needs some wins against its most violent enemies. Ukraine and Israel both offer opportunities for the U.S. to realize valuable security gains without risking a single American soldier. Obviously, it’s important for American policy makers to proceed cautiously. Russia wields a nuclear deterrent. Gaza is a bad place to fight a ground war. But precisely by its generosity, the U.S. has earned the right to dissuade its partners from launching operations that seem ill-advised.

So what of the idea that the U.S. should back away from helping because it’s all too much trouble? Because the country that during the Cold War defended both Germany and Japan with its Army and Navy is now too feeble to aid two friendly democracies that ask only for material and technical assistance to defend themselves? Because a few dozen Republican House members and a handful of Republican senators are intimidated by Donald Trump and addled by social media?

For the U.S. to back away from its commitments for these reasons would be simply shameful.

The United States can succeed. The United States is succeeding. There’s never a good time to yield to bad-faith isolationism, but for a great nation animated by high ideals, this moment would be an especially bad time to do so.

President Biden will host EU's Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen as war rages in Gaza and Ukraine.

War in Israel favours Russia but the US has the financial muscle to fight on both fronts, Natasha Lindsteadt, Professor of Politics at the University of Essex tells Euronews.

President addresses US in rare Oval Office speech and explains why country should back Ukraine and Israel.