The Last Time a Concert Documentary Saved the Movies

After the box-office triumph of Barbenheimer this past summer, Hollywood stumbled into an uneasy fall season. The dual writer and actor strikes contributed to delayed releases, which blunted the predicted slow-walk back to theaters in the wake of COVID restrictions. Yet the second half of 2023 also yielded welcome surprises, the most unexpected of which was the success of the concert documentary.

Both Taylor Swift and Beyoncé made surprise announcements that their record-breaking tours were hitting the big screen. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour opened in theaters in October and domestically outgrossed several major studios’ franchise entries, including the most recent Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones sequels. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé dominated the first weekend of December, leveraging a historically light portion of the release calendar. Although Renaissance’s $21.8 million first-weekend box office didn’t match the juggernaut of The Eras Tour’s $92.8 million opening, it soared above the debut of any other concert film released in more than a decade. This made 2023 the first year in modern box-office reporting in which two concert documentaries reached No. 1.

[Read this: Taylor Swift did what Hollywood studios could not]

But this isn’t the first time this niche medium has lured droves of viewers to theaters. Concert documentaries have proven to be a lucrative and resilient option for the industry during uncertain times.

In the late 1960s, Hollywood studios were in a state of crisis, thanks to the rise of television. Studios incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in losses while financing expensive costume dramas and musicals that struggled to turn profits. Moreover, Hollywood was completing its first major sea change in upper management, as the original movie moguls retired and studios started merging with other companies. Warner Bros. was exemplary of these shifts. Managerial instability yielded a brief period of risk-taking among executives desperate to connect with young audiences, leading to bold projects such as Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and George Lucas’s THX 1138.

During this time, Warner Bros. made an even bolder move: distributing a three-hour documentary epic about the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Woodstock wasn’t the only rock festival of the late 1960s, yet in attracting more than 400,000 attendees, it ballooned into a national media event. Over a rainy weekend, the festival transformed rural farmland into a mud-caked hippie wonderland that immediately, if romantically and selectively, became shorthand for the utopian communal ideals of American Baby Boomer counterculture.

[Read this: Photos of Woodstock 1969, on its 50th anniversary]

In hopes of receiving remuneration for the festival, Woodstock’s organizers bankrolled a documentary film on little more than a note of interest from Warner Bros. The Warner executive Fred Weintraub, who was “in charge of alternative lifestyle,” as described by the entertainment journalist Peter Biskind in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, won over skeptical studio power brokers by highlighting the project’s minimal financial risk.

The studio’s initial doubt morphed into fervent support. In one internal marketing memo, Warner Bros. pledged to treat the film’s release “like the second coming of Christ.” The studio was convinced that the movie would appeal to everyone, from those “who participated at Woodstock to the curious adult who read and heard about this strange and wonderful event.” Warner Bros. began wall-to-wall promotion via mainstream and college radio, a CBS making-of special, and a triple-LP soundtrack.

The film’s marketing promised more than a Woodstock recap, billing the movie as a way to vicariously attend the festival itself. That same memo committed to focusing print advertising not just on the festival’s star performers, but on “the 400,000 wonderful young people” who attended Woodstock, thereby inviting audiences to count themselves among the Woodstock community. The British poster, for one, gave a simple command: “Be there.”

Woodstock was an unprecedented success. According to The Numbers, it grossed $34.5 million domestically (roughly $277.9 million today) on a $600,000 budget, becoming the sixth-highest-grossing film of 1970, just behind The Aristocats. In 1971, Variety reported that the film was a “godsend” for a struggling Warner Bros. Adjusted for inflation, Woodstock remains the highest-grossing concert documentary of all time.

The Eras Tour, Renaissance, and Woodstock offer divergent experiences as films and cultural events. Woodstock is a kaleidoscopic observation of the transformative power of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The Eras Tour is a cohesive catalog from our most powerful and perhaps most circumspect pop star. And Renaissance is a contemplative look at the making of a tour, the biography of its star, and expressions of Black and queer joy.

Yet all three films mirror one another in how they were carefully designed to connect with moviegoers. Like Woodstock’s instruction that viewers “Be there,” The Eras Tour and Renaissance were promoted as collective social experiences, where audiences could sing and dance together while documenting their good times on social media. The movies’ promotion relied less on traditional trailers and television spots, instead assuming that audiences already knew these tours to be seismic, economy–shaping events.

Because concert documentaries take up only a fraction of live-music tours’ costs and infrastructure, their filmmaking efficiency surpasses that of narrative films (given the latter’s longer production timelines, extended marketing rollouts, and greater costs). As such, it hardly matters whether Renaissance captures similar numbers as The Eras Tour or Woodstock. Unlike franchise tentpole films, which studios consider successful only if they gross approximately $1 billion worldwide, concert documentaries can work at various scales. The triumph of this year’s films will certainly bring more concert docs onto movie screens, having upended the presumption that they’re better fit for streaming. In theaters, they can offer us a union of live music and film, two of the in-person art forms that many of us, during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, craved.   

Whether traditional Hollywood studios once again recognize the value of concert documentaries remains to be seen. Unlike Woodstock, The Eras Tour and Renaissance were released without the involvement of a major distributor. Each was made under terms sanctioned by the striking unions, created through the artist’s own production company, and distributed by AMC Theatres. Whereas Warner Bros. was keen to release a concert doc as a major movie event in 1970, Warner Bros. Discovery’s current CEO and president appears less inclined toward risk, having developed a habit of disappearing already-produced films for short-term financial gain. Amid this studio dysfunction, concert documentaries have given movie theaters an opportunity to save themselves.