Taylor Swift Beats Tom Cruise’s Biggest Movie In Just Three Days
Taylor Swift’s concert film The Official Release Party of a Showgirl detonated the global box office with a $50 million opening from Oct. 3–5, eclipsing the entire lifetime gross of Tom Cruise’s 1999 film Magnolia.
File this under things that should not be possible but absolutely are: Taylor Swift just dropped a three-day concert film and it muscled past prestige movies and star vehicles like it was nothing.
The film and the setup
"The Official Release Party of a Showgirl" is not your standard tour doc. It splices performance moments with behind-the-scenes bits, lyric-video style interludes, and quick interview snippets where Swift talks through her songs. She wrote and directed it herself, so yes, it is very much the full Swift package. Theaters were packed mostly with women, and that was more than enough to tilt the entire weekend.
- Title: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl
- Director: Taylor Swift
- Runtime: 1h 29m
- Rotten Tomatoes: 64%
- Theatrical window: Oct 3-5 only
Box office: the three-day smash
In one weekend, from Oct 3 to Oct 5, the movie pulled in $50 million worldwide, per Box Office Mojo. For context, that is more than Tom Cruise and Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia" managed in its entire run back in 1999, which topped out at $48.4 million worldwide. Different eras, different formats, same scoreboard.
It did not stop there. Swift's three-day window also leapfrogged a string of 2025 theatrical openers with far bigger budgets and months of marketing:
Dwayne Johnson's "The Smashing Machine" ($6 million opening weekend), Leonardo DiCaprio's "One Battle After Another" ($22 million opening weekend), and "Good Boy" ($2.3 million opening weekend) all got outpaced by what is essentially a concert documentary. Industry chatter says some studios were not thrilled to watch their ad spends get eclipsed by a pop star event, per NBC News.
Meanwhile, the album is a juggernaut
Over on the music side, "The Life of a Showgirl" is racking up numbers at an absurd clip. In its first five days, it sold and streamed more than 3.5 million units worldwide, according to Billboard. The last time anyone got this close? Adele, whose "25" did 3.48 million in its first week back in 2015. Swift just cleared that bar.
Streaming-wise, "The Life of a Showgirl" has already logged 2025's second-biggest streaming week for any album, trailing only Morgan Wallen's "I'm the Problem," which debuted in May with 462.63 million streams. That puts "Showgirl" among the top 10 most-streamed albums ever in a single week. And of course, Swift still holds the all-time crown: "The Tortured Poets Department" set the record in 2024 with a massive 891.37 million first-week streams.
Also, there are 32 different versions of "The Life of a Showgirl" out there. Each one offers a little something extra, which, yes, absolutely helps juice both sales and streams. If you are wondering about deep-cut visuals, there is a "The Fate of Ophelia" music video in the mix too.
"When Taylor Swift releases something, the world pays attention."
Bottom line: star power plus scarcity equals a tidal wave. Did you see the film during its three-day run? And what is your favorite track on "The Life of a Showgirl" right now?