20 Movies Way More Successful Than Anyone Expected

Even accepting that Taylor Swift is a peerlessly popular pop-star, concert films inherently have a low ceiling placed on their box office potential. 

For one, they're only going to appeal to the particular fanbase in question with little chance of a wider breakout, and there are simply many who have no interest in watching a concert in a cinema.

Even accepting that social media chatter indicated Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour would be an easy hit from its $15 million budget, few anticipated the numbers it would end up pulling.

Astonishingly the film earned $100 million in global pre-sales a week before release, and went on to make a total of $267.1 million worldwide.

This not only made it by far the highest-grossing concert film of all time - almost tripling the $99 million grossed by 2011's Justin Bieber: Never Say Never - but saw it outperform the likes of The Marvels, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, The Equalizer 3, Insidious: The Red Door, Scream VI, and Killers of the Flower Moon.

This performance is certainly an outlier that speaks to Swift's omnipresence in pop culture, but it goes without saying that if she ever releases a second concert film, such success won't be nearly as surprising.