Taylor Swift - Midnights

[ampersand]

Sept 1, 2023 14:15:34 GMT -5 Choco said:

Sept 1, 2023 2:27:49 GMT -5 👑 Eloquent ™ said:

I'm not sure how big her concert film will open tbh. I really doubt 100 million is feasible as that number just seems too huge, even for Taylor to do all by herself. I do think she'll top Bieber's $29 million opening ($73 million total) however and will go on to take the title for the highest grossing concert film ever though! I am gonna say she opens with around $45-50 million, which would be amazing!

$37M from day one presales. $100M at play.

Bieber's record is surely going down.

Streaming premiere expected towards the end of the year or early 2024. Can't wait to see it on my 60 inch screen (it's not coming to theaters here sadly).

It won't be on streaming until January 13th at the earliest. It's been reported that Taylor's deal with AMC is that she has to wait 13 weeks before she can put it on streaming.

Some other interesting news about the deal:

[👑 Eloquent ™]

Sept 1, 2023 14:15:34 GMT -5 Choco said:

Sept 1, 2023 2:27:49 GMT -5 👑 Eloquent ™ said:

I'm not sure how big her concert film will open tbh. I really doubt 100 million is feasible as that number just seems too huge, even for Taylor to do all by herself. I do think she'll top Bieber's $29 million opening ($73 million total) however and will go on to take the title for the highest grossing concert film ever though! I am gonna say she opens with around $45-50 million, which would be amazing!

$37M from day one presales. $100M at play.

Bieber's record is surely going down.

Streaming premiere expected towards the end of the year or early 2024. Can't wait to see it on my 60 inch screen (it's not coming to theaters here sadly).

Yeah I already addressed it on the last page. His record for sure is in shambles. $100 million is just INSANE to think of. Like truly insane. Even for Taylor. Like that would be a fantastic opening for a feature film, but for a concert?!!! I love how Taylor always exceeds expectations, mine included The article said she is gunning for what, a $70 million opening? Bananas.

[Choco]

Numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt because by design these concert films are very frontloaded. But I think worst case scenario it opens to 60M which is already 3x the budget.

[👑 Eloquent ™]

Wait, could this tie Jennifer Lopez's record of having the #1 album and #1 movie at the box office with 1989(TV)? Oh dang...no...it's too far apart. Missed opportunity! lol

[ificanthaveyou]

Sept 1, 2023 19:11:59 GMT -5 👑 Eloquent ™ said:

Wait, could this tie Jennifer Lopez's record of having the #1 album and #1 movie at the box office with 1989(TV)? Oh dang...no...it's too far apart. Missed opportunity! lol

October is a SUPER weak month due to the strike. If she releases Eras: Extended Edition with all of the surprise performances added it can definitely make another 10 million easily. Taylor is the Queen of Re-Releases!

[Rose "Payola" Nylund]

Has she had anything on streaming other than Disney+?

[ificanthaveyou]

Sept 1, 2023 22:15:36 GMT -5 Rose "Payola" Nylund said:

Has she had anything on streaming other than Disney+?

Netflix!

[Choco]

1989 tour had some sort of Apple deal as well, then she had Reputation and Miss Americana on Netflix.

There are currently no deals with any major studio for this so it will likely go to whichever streamer pays the most.

[Deleted]

When Long Ponds came out, I thought the deal with Apple was for two “movies.” If that’s true there should be one left in that deal.

[Choco]

Sept 2, 2023 4:59:04 GMT -5 @mithras said:

When Long Ponds came out, I thought the deal with Apple was for two “movies.” If that’s true there should be one left in that deal.

Long Pond was on Disney+.

[thezatch]

If she is smart (and we all know she is), she will keep this in theatres as long as possible. As it was pointed out previously, theatres are hurting for content to draw people in (October this year was kind of light to begin with, even before the strikes) and she will get a higher percentage of the profits from ticket sales if it’s kept in theatres over one lump sum selling it to a streamer. Plus once it’s streaming, it will be pirated, and she sees no coins from that.

Go to the movies, y’all.

[👑 Eloquent ™]

Did anyone catch what Olivia Rodrigo said about Taylor and the possibility of "Vampire" being about her? She essentially left the door open and with an answer pretty much ripped from the Swift handbook (she doesn't like to pigeonhole and say who her songs are about but was surprised people thought that etc). That rubbed me the wrong way. Like girl, be so for real. You don't have to say who it's about to say it isn't about Taylor. No need to further use her name to generage buzz for your new lukewarm era when so much of your artistry is influenced by her to begin with. lol

[ampersand]

Lol. I truly don't understand the issue here. Is Taylor the only one who is allowed to say she doesn't want to be specific about who her songs are about? I think the fact that Olivia is surprised that people think it's about Taylor pretty much says everything here. I don't know how you can listen to "Vampire" and think it's about her unless you're really reaching.

[suburbandreams]

Sept 2, 2023 22:21:59 GMT -5 ampersand said:

Lol. I truly don't understand the issue here. Is Taylor the only one who is allowed to say she doesn't want to be specific about who her songs are about? I think the fact that Olivia is surprised that people think it's about Taylor pretty much says everything here. I don't know how you can listen to "Vampire" and think it's about her unless you're really reaching.

The issue is that stans and gossip lovers on twitter and reddit have imagined a giant feud between Taylor and Olivia. The evidence is that Olivia no longer wants to talk about Taylor and that Taylor received credits for deja vu. It's unclear what actually happened. Haley Williams didn't know about receiving credit for misery business until the deal was done. This isn't surprising since it's basically always publishers that manage copyright issues. It would make sense for Taylor/Jack's publisher to reach out to Olivia's team or Olivia's team to reach out first since Olivia both copied the melody of cadence of Cruel Summer's bridge and admitted that she set out to mimic said bridge when crafting the song.  There are many ways that situation could have gone done but the speculation has become very toxic.

There is clearly some tension but neither one wants to talk about each other so people should really leave it alone. But there's a big desire for them to be at odds and most especially for Taylor to have victimized Olivia.

Anytime when Olivia's tries to avoid talking about Taylor, it gives them more grist for the narrative. As a result, of people dragging Taylor over Olivia, many swifties are now pissed at Olivia. They want Olivia to stop completely dodging Taylor questions and just say something positive about Taylor to stop the feud rumors.

So Olivia dodging the vampire question in an interview where she also had a little discussion about the plagarism rumors is really pissing off the swifties because Taylor is getting dragged a lot over the credits. They want Olivia either to discuss her issues with Taylor or start blacklisting Taylor questions for her interviewers.

It's toxic situation. I wish people would allow two women to not be best buds and have some tension between each other without making it into a huge deal. But unfortunately,  mentioning Taylor drives web traffic so all the interviewers are asking Olivia about it and it's increasing the toxicity.  People want to make vampire about Taylor for this narrative.

[ampersand]

This whole situation is hilarious to me. Do people seriously believe that Taylor Swift, a 33 year-old woman, is beefing with someone who was recently a teenager? If some Swifties honestly believe that, it says more about what they really think about their fav than anything about either of these two women.

[taylor]

What’s even funnier is that “vampire” is literally about a man Olivia was in a toxic relationship with, referred to sarcastically as “cool guy” at one point early on. It’s been said before when “vampire” first released that not one lyric in that song has a modicum of relevance to Taylor, and if it weren’t for that trash Guardian bringing Taylor up I would see no other reason for Liv to be brought up in here at the moment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[suburbandreams]

Sept 2, 2023 23:17:12 GMT -5 ampersand said:

This whole situation is hilarious to me. Do people seriously believe that Taylor Swift, a 33 year-old woman, is beefing with someone who was recently a teenager? If some Swifties honestly believe that, it says more about what they really think about their fav than anything about either of these two women.

It's more about the nature of stan spaces. Stans use anything and everything to attack their fan's rivals. It then makes the opposing stans more defensive and aggressive in return.  It creates a really toxic cycle where stans attack other artists because said artist's  stans attacked their favs. Lana and Taylor stans were giving each other's album 0 stars on metacritic in 2019 since the two albums had started getting compared in stan bases. A stan leaving a 0 star review would  lead many opposing stans to do the same (this happens with many different pop artists when they release around the same time).

Since Taylor is the most commercially successful artist of the 21th century, she also gets one of the most if not the most amount of baseless attacks. This actually feeds the size of her stanbase as said attacks make stans more dedicated. You can really see this phenoma in kpop survival shows. Bahiyyih and Wonhee were contestants that got attacked due to their young age and relative inexperience. This resulted in them having the biggest solo fanbases as stans started passionately supporting them because they were put off by the attacks against them. By nature of them being on a reality competition show, they weren't interacting with online stans at all but the stan ecosystem still led to this toxic cycle.

[Caviar]

That’s why Doja cusses out the Kittens so much. Stan culture is TOXIC.

[Choco]

All valid comments here but I'm not huge on the way Olivia worded her response. These interviews are all pre approved and yet the answer was vague enough to fuel a stan war when she could have just talked about how it was about an old flame.

Yeah yeah, stan culture is toxic (until you need 30k people to blindly buy a digital single or a variant cover to ensure a higher peak...)

[daddy]

Even as a Taylor stan, I find Swifties getting upset at Olivia over this comical as back in the day (around Olivia’s age), Taylor very likely would have provided a very similar sort of answer 😂

[Deleted]

Sept 3, 2023 3:50:08 GMT -5 daddy said:

Even as a Taylor stan, I find Swifties getting upset at Olivia over this comical as back in the day (around Olivia’s age), Taylor very likely would have provided a very similar sort of answer 😂

What's wrong with that answer at any given age tho? 

[ampersand]

I read a really great piece in The New Yorker today:

Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison

The first time I heard about Taylor Swift, I was in a Los Angeles County jail, waiting to be sent to prison for murder. Sheriffs would hand out precious copies of the Los Angeles Times, and they would be passed from one reader to the next. Back then, I swore that Prince was the best songwriter of my lifetime, and I thought Swift’s rise to teen-age stardom was an injustice. I’d look up from her wide-eyed face in the Calendar section to see gang fights and race riots. The jail was full of young men of color who wrote and performed their own raps, often about chasing money and fame, while Swift was out there, actually getting rich and famous. How fearless could any little blond fluff like that really be?

In 2009, I was sentenced to life in prison. Early one morning, I boarded a bus in shackles and a disposable jumpsuit, and rode to Calipatria State Prison, a cement fortress on the southern fringes of California. Triple-digit temperatures, cracked orange soil, and pungent whiffs of the nearby Salton Sea made me feel as though I’d been exiled to Mars. After six years in the chaos of the county jail, however, I could finally own small luxuries, like a television. The thick walls of Calipat, as we called the place, stifled our radio reception, but an institutional antenna delivered shows like “Access Hollywood,” “Entertainment Tonight,” and “TMZ.” I was irritated by the celebrity gossip, but it was a connection to the outside world, and it introduced me to snippets of Swift’s performances for the first time. Here and there, I’d catch her on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” or “Fallon,” and was surprised by how intently she discussed her songwriting. I didn’t tell anyone that I thought she was talented.

In 2013, when my security level was lowered owing to good behavior, I requested a transfer to Solano state prison, the facility with a Level 3 yard which was closest to my family in the Bay Area. I got the transfer, but my property—a TV, CD player, soap, toothpaste, lotion, food—was lost in transit. I shared a cell with someone in the same situation, so, for months, we relied on the kindness of our neighbors to get by. Our only source of music was a borrowed pocket radio, hooked up to earbuds that cost three dollars at the commissary. At night, we’d crank up the volume and lay the earbuds on the desk in our cell. Those tiny speakers radiated crickety renditions of Top Forty hits.

During that time, I heard tracks from “Red,” Swift’s fourth studio album, virtually every hour. I was starting to enjoy them. Laying on the top bunk, I would listen to my cellmate’s snores and wait for “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” to come around again. When it did, I would think about the woman I had lived with for seven years, before prison. I remembered bittersweet times when my sweetheart had visited me in county jail. We’d look at each other through security glass that was reinforced by wire. It didn’t seem fair to expect her to wait for me, and I told her that she deserved a partner who could be with her. But we didn’t use the word “never,” and deep down I always hoped that we’d get back together. When I heard “Everything Has Changed,” I had to fight back tears of exaltation and grief. Swift sings, “All I knew this morning when I woke / Is I know something now / Know something now I didn’t before.” I thought back to our first date, and how we had talked and laughed late into the night. We had to force ourselves to get a few hours of sleep before sunrise.

After several months, my belongings, including my CD player, finally caught up with me. I was getting ready to buy “Red” from a catalogue of approved CDs when I learned that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or C.D.C.R., had placed me on another transfer list. I didn’t want the album to get stuck at the prison after I had been transferred, so I resorted to a country station that regularly featured Swift. Sometimes, hearing Southern drawls and honky-tonk medleys, I’d laugh out loud at myself. But that was the station that played the widest variety of her music, from “Tim McGraw” to “I Knew You Were Trouble.” There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness. When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.

Hitting a new yard—in this case, the prison known as the California Men’s Colony (C.M.C.)—means finding new friends and allies. Each table and workout area was claimed by a different gang or ethnic group. I’m Asian and Hispanic, and I chose to join the Asians in a cement workout area. When they asked me what kind of music I liked, I confessed that I was anxiously waiting for a Taylor Swift album. Everyone laughed. “Oh, my God, we’ve got a Swiftie on the yard!” Lam, a muscular guy, told me. “You in touch with your sensitive side? Are you gay?” He especially loved to heckle me in front of his buddy Hung, who spoke little and laughed almost silently.

I was waiting for “Red” to arrive when I saw Swift perform “All Too Well” at the 2014 Grammys. That became the song that I played first when I peeled the plastic wrap off the disc, and the song I’d stop at and repeat whenever I spun the album. (Her ten-minute version is even better.) As Swift sang about love’s magical moments, how they are found and lost again, I thought about a time before my incarceration, when I briefly broke up with the woman I loved. She came to my house to return one of my T-shirts. When she hung it on the doorknob and walked away, I was on the other side. I sensed that someone was there, but, by the time I opened the door, she was gone.

When “Red” arrived, I finally found out why Lam had been clowning me in front of Hung. “Red” was the only Swift CD that Hung didn’t own—because he considered it a misguided pop departure from the country greatness of “Fearless” and “Speak Now.” Eventually, Lam outed himself as a Swiftie, too. For six months, the three of us would work out and debate which album was best. Then Hung transferred out of the prison, taking his CDs with him.

Around the time Swift dropped “1989,” I acquired an old-school boom box. Technically, exchanging property and altering devices is against C.D.C.R. rules, but every prison has guys who fill their cells with radios, TVs, and speakers to repair and resell. I looked out for one guy, G.L., when he first hit the yard, and he became one of the best electronic fix-it guys I’ve ever met. He loved reconfiguring different speakers to get the best sound. He rewired the boom box for auxiliary cables and gave it to me. At C.M.C., I had a cell to myself, so I’d turn up the music enough to drown out obnoxious sounds outside my cell. Of course, some people always think that Swift is the obnoxious sound. “What’s up with the damn Taylor Swift?” a neighbor yells out. Another voice chimes in with requests: “Play ‘Style.’ That song’s tight right there.” By the time the song ends, someone new will admit, “That girl’s got jams.”

When you transfer between prisons, you can’t take any undocumented property with you. At the end of 2015, I gave that boom box back to G.L. and left C.M.C. for Folsom prison. After a year, I landed at San Quentin. I started working at the San Quentin News, the in-house newspaper, for a quarter an hour. Around that time, C.D.C.R. started allowing a vender to sell us MP3 players for a hundred dollars. They charged $1.75 per song and ten dollars for a memory card. Eventually, I asked my family to order one and would call my cousin Roxan with requests. “What’s up with all the damn Taylor Swift?” she’d say during phone calls. By the time Swift released her album “Lover,” in 2019, I had almost every song she’d ever released. And, when the MP3 players were restricted because crafty folks were using the memory cards in illegal cell phones, mine was grandfathered in.

One of my homies at San Quentin had a pristine radio that played CDs and cassette tapes. When he earned parole, everybody hounded him for it. He knew how much I’d appreciate such a luxury, but I didn’t join the herd of pesterers making offers, and I think he appreciated that. He gave it to me as a parting gift. I was even able to have it officially documented on my property card. The MP3 player clipped neatly into the cassette door, so now I could see my playlists while I listened. My neighbor, Rasta, was the weed man for the building, so I played Swift to drown out the guys who were lighting up outside. Rasta made fun of me, but the crowd always liked her “Bad Blood” remix, featuring Kendrick Lamar. “That’s the shit right there,” they’d say. “Who would’ve thought?”

Seven months after “Lover” came out, C.D.C.R. shut down all programming because of the COVID pandemic—no indoor group interactions, no volunteers from outside the prison, no visitors. C.D.C.R. brought the coronavirus into San Quentin when it moved some sick guys from another prison in. By the end of June, 2020, hundreds of us were testing positive and getting sick, including me. I lugged all my property to an isolation cell in a quarantine unit, where I shivered and sweated through a brain fog for two weeks. My only human contact came from nurses in full-body P.P.E., who checked my vitals, and skeleton crews of officers—the ones who weren’t sick themselves—who brought us intermittent meals. I followed San Quentin’s death tallies on the local news. Would I die alone in this cell, suddenly and violently breathless? I made a playlist of Swift’s most uplifting songs, listening for the happiness in her voice.

Alone in a prison cell, it’s virtually impossible to avoid oneself. As my body and mind began to recover, I started to question everything. What really matters? Who am I? What if I die tomorrow? I hadn’t been in touch with my sweetheart in more than two years, because she had told me that she was trying a relationship with someone who cared about her. Now, though, I wrote her a letter to see if she was O.K.

A week after I mailed my letter, I received one from her. Prison mail is slow enough that I knew it wasn’t a response—we had decided to write to each other at the same time. “The lockdown has afforded me plenty of time to reflect on all sorts of things,” her letter said. “I’ve been carrying you with me everywhere.” Reading it brought to mind Swift’s lyrics in “Daylight”: “I don’t wanna think of anything else now that I thought of you.” She was single again, and we started talking every week. In lockdown, between paltry dinner trays, I did pushups, lunges, squats, and planks in the twenty-two-inch-wide floor space in my cell. The twentieth year of my incarceration was approaching.

In 2020, the California legislature passed a law that made anyone who served twenty continuous years, and who was at least fifty years of age, eligible for parole. I’m fifty-three, and I’ll get my first chance at release in 2024. I couldn’t help but think of “Daylight” again. “I’ve been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night,” Swift sings. “And now I see daylight.”

These days, I call my sweetheart as often as I can. Officers can shut down the phones with the flick of a switch, and technical glitches often take the system offline, so I treat each call as if it were my last. It often feels like she’s waiting to hear from me. She tells me that it’s complicated and confusing for her, speaking to the ghost who disappeared twenty years ago. But, leaning against a wall, next to all the other guys talking with loved ones on the phone, I don’t feel like a ghost. I feel alive. Just recently, she told me, “Talking like this over the phone so much, I think we’ve gotten to know each other way better than before.” We talk about how much we have changed. “You might not even find me attractive anymore,” she tells me. “I’m not the same person I was back then.”

One morning in October, 2022, I had breakfast in the chow hall and made it back to my cell in time for “Good Morning America.” My TV doesn’t have any speakers, so I plugged it into my boom box. Suddenly, I heard a familiar voice singing an unfamiliar chorus: “It’s me, hi / I’m the problem, it’s me.” The anchors on the broadcast were giddy to announce Swift’s new album “Midnights,” and play clips from the music video of “Anti-Hero.” Swift appeared as a larger-than-life figure, arguing with different versions of herself. I laughed to myself. Here we go again.

Our MP3 distributor was always slow to release new music, so I spent a couple of weeks hearing about the album on the news, waiting for my chance to listen. Then, out on the prison grounds, I bumped into a volunteer whom I’d known and worked with for years. We were walking through the yard together when they started looking around to make sure no one was watching. After confirming that the coast was clear, they slipped me a brand-new copy of “Midnights” and wished me a happy birthday. The gesture nearly brought me to tears. That evening, after dinner, I peeled off the plastic and brushed a bit of dust out of the boom box’s CD player. “Lavender Haze” played as I read the liner notes. “What keeps you up at night?” Swift writes.

For the past two decades, sleep has not come easily to me. Often, when I get into bed, I think about the day I was arrested at the scene of my crime. Some neighbors called 911 and reported gunshots. I can still see the grieving family members of the man I killed, staring at me in the courtroom at my trial. I’m guilty of more than murder. I abandoned my parents and my sweetheart, too. There’s no way to fix this stuff.

Taylor Swift is currently the same age, thirty-three, that I was when I was arrested. I wonder whether her music would have resonated with me when I was her age. I wonder whether I would have reacted to the words “I’m the problem, it’s me.” Hers must be champagne problems compared with mine, but I still see myself in them. “I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,” Swift sings, and I think of the three-by-five-inch plastic mirrors that are available inside. For years out there, I viewed myself as the antihero in my own warped self-narrative. Do I want to see myself clearly?

In “Karma,” Swift sings, “Ask me what I learned from all those years / Ask me what I earned from all those tears.” A few months from now, California’s Board of Parole Hearings will ask me questions like that. What have I learned? What do I have to show for my twenty years of incarceration? In the months ahead, when these questions keep me up at night, I will listen to “Midnights.” The woman I love says she’s ready to meet me on the other side of the prison wall, on the day that I walk into the daylight. Recently, she asked me, “If you could go anywhere, do anything, that first day out, what would you want us to go do?” That question keeps me up at night, too. ♦

www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/listening-to-taylor-swift-in-prison

[Marooned@Midnight]

^what an unexpected and interesting read.

[👑 Eloquent ™]

Sept 3, 2023 1:31:18 GMT -5 Choco said:

All valid comments here but I'm not huge on the way Olivia worded her response. These interviews are all pre approved and yet the answer was vague enough to fuel a stan war when she could have just talked about how it was about an old flame.

Yeah yeah, stan culture is toxic (until you need 30k people to blindly buy a digital single or a variant cover to ensure a higher peak...)

This was my only complaint. Like it would have been so simple to dismiss without revealing who the song was written about (especially given she is aware of what people have been saying about their "fued"). The answer felt intentionally vague which then makes me question the purpose.

[Choco]

Which to me just points to the fact that something went on behind the scenes, likely due to the Deja Vu/Cruel Summer credits.

[Joe1240]

Sept 2, 2023 4:59:04 GMT -5 @mithras said:

When Long Ponds came out, I thought the deal with Apple was for two “movies.” If that’s true there should be one left in that deal.

The Director for The Eras Tour movie also directed both Billie Ellish and BTS Disney Plus films and Taylor still has one movie left in her contract. There is a very good chance it lands there.

[daddy]

Sept 3, 2023 5:00:23 GMT -5 @stateofgrace said:

Sept 3, 2023 3:50:08 GMT -5 daddy said:

Even as a Taylor stan, I find Swifties getting upset at Olivia over this comical as back in the day (around Olivia’s age), Taylor very likely would have provided a very similar sort of answer 😂

What's wrong with that answer at any given age tho? 

There’s nothing wrong with it.

Assuming it’s not about Taylor, it would be very easy to say “no” to the question and nip any discussion of it in the bud. But that’s not going to get the public talking about it anymore. The ambiguous answer leaves it open to either possibility, driving fans to discuss it (as we are on this board).

While I won’t assume it was Olivia’s intention, her response was an easy way to get people talking about her/“Vampire”.

[musiclife]

Sept 3, 2023 14:24:47 GMT -5 Marooned@Midnight said:

^what an unexpected and interesting read.

Yeah, fantastic read.

[ificanthaveyou]

Any idea if Taylor is performing at the VMAs next week?

I could see her promoting her movie by performing Cruel Summer, Karma, and Blank Space (TV)…

[Rose "Payola" Nylund]

I'm not sure the movie needs promotion.

She could still show up to perform just because. It would be fun!