The ‘film’ was shot from August 3 to 5, 2023. It was in movie theaters on October 11. I’ve been a part of a few concert films way back in the day and that is an insane production schedule. In the wiki, it says that she did the entire thing at what the union rates would have been if SAG had gotten everything they wanted during the strike.
The reason for the spread in their budget is likely because they don’t know how many of the concert costs were passed on to the production. She funded the movie herself, but just the road crew/stage/costume/set/performer costs of doing a concert like described are likely enormous alone without cameras being there.
From the tour wiki:
The Eras Tour was produced by Swift’s in-house tour production company, Taylor Swift Touring.[110] The Wall Street Journal reported, the tour is one of the most expensive and “technically ambitious” productions of the 21st century.
[111] Interior design magazine Architectural Digest named the tour Swift’s “most ambitious” set design and praised its worldbuilding.[112]
I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t speculate as to how much it cost to make the film from a technical standpoint. My guess is there were a minimum of 10 extremely high-end static cameras, likely multiple other high-end roving cameras, VR video/VR audio, and all kinds of other equipment. The director of the movie probably got paid north of $1 million to do the show and each performer was paid under proposed union rates not current union rates even though the show was not a union production (it was allowed to proceed forward and be promoted during the strike because of these conditions).
A ‘regular’ concert film probably usually takes about 6 months to a year to complete in post. This also likely had to go into a high-end recording studio first and then a film dub stage second to be mixed, unless all the equipment needed to get a high-end mix was the arena and their goal was to capture the sound as it would have been in the arena rather than like mixing an album from live elements. They would have had to rent a high-end mixing console (this was probably provided by the arena but probably needed to have several modifications for this made) and whatever would be needed to record the material (likely a Pro Tools rig or several rigs with probably 10 or more layers of backup hard drives to make sure nothing got missed).
To give you a slight amount of background in a different direction, I was essentially a sound supervisor for a documentary for a live screening of the movie Moonlight in Los Angeles shortly before the Oscars. That screening was showing the movie in an old theater in downtown L.A. and the composer of the movie played the score to the movie live with an orchestra. We were commissioned to document the event for an exclusive iTunes piece and it was one of the rare times I got to be involved in the production of something (was involved in several big shoots for Harry Potter DVDs that were complex for sound production and one for the Field of Dreams DVD that was almost impossible to carry off the way they wanted without doing a lot of goofy stuff production people weren’t able to do in that era easily).
We made the decision to hire a production sound person we’d never used before who was able to bring a Pro Tools rig to the event. We were allowed to set up in a little room in the back of the first level of the theater that had a square opening and a view of the screen. There was a crew that was just related to the movie screening that was giving the house sound and we had to get all the tracks the live guy set up (we were not allowed to do requests, we just had to take what he was doing) recorded into our rig that was over 100 feet away from where the live guy was positioned. I also brought my own Zoom recorder to capture stereo audience that I hoped to use in the mixing of the pieces we did (describing the experience, showing a few clips, and also mixing a Q&A). I have no idea how much the overall budget was for that, something very easy overall, but I’d be surprised if it was under $250,000 (our part wasn’t that much of it but it probably cost 10 times what a normal production for us did) and it wasn’t intended to play anywhere but that place. Once it was done, I had to mix the score from the elements I was given (very difficult because of the bleed through from the screen), without knowing what would be used. Only a handful of cues were used in our piece but I still got to bill for mixing all of them. Based on looking at the IMDb credits, I think this movie was done similarly to how I did the sound for that but on a much higher scale (live person–>straight to post), though it seems a bit hard to believe that a regular Re-Recording Mixer would be completely handling a movie like that.
A secondary anecdote is for a documentary I’m co-producing, we needed to do a three-day shoot on our own dime while waiting to get backed in Fort Worth. We wanted these to be two-camera shoots, and set up preliminary budgets based on L.A. rates, even though the 2nd camera wasn’t intended to be used unless we needed it. Based on doing a rough budget, we couldn’t afford to get the same camera for the second camera as the first camera, and brought our own lower end camera to record the second side, and we paid about $3,000 a day for this single camera shoot at multiple locations with external sound.
The camera was high-end but it was nowhere near the kind of cameras they have for a concert like this that’s going to movie theaters (most concerts don’t go to movie theaters, they go to TV or home video). I wouldn’t be surprised if their camera budget for this was at least $250,000 per shoot day, and they probably did quite a few rehearsals as well to get camera blocking and style (again, I’m just speculating because I haven’t seen it).
Compressed post-production is extremely expensive and she probably had to pay for all the prints that were made (it was put on 4,000 screens in the U.S. and 8500 overall). It’s possible she got the distributors to take on some of that cost, but it’s no telling how much. I also just read that this was available on IMAX format, though I don’t know if it was shot in IMAX, as well.
I doubt any wide release movie, even if it was one guy chewing gum on a movie screen would cost under $1 million to release, and this wasn’t anything like that. As an FYI, there were 6 editors on the film, which is not normal but understandable based on the compressed schedule.
There are 101 people listed in the crew on IMDb and I counted at least 16 camera operators with some tech I don’t know whether it’s camera or control of cameras (a drone operator is still a camera operator). Nearly half the crew is related to camera and for our crew we had a camera operator and a sound guy. Camera costs were enormous on this.
