Fifteen minutes to go until the beginning of the end: the last concert of the Eras Tour. Taylor Swift is in a tight circle with her backup singers, dancers and musicians. She attempts a motivational speech, swallowing hard. “Everyone likes to talk about phenomenons like The Eras Tour almost like it was pieces falling into place in some sort of accidental confluence of events that just happened, right?” says the 35-year-old artist to the group, tears in her eyes. “This was the biggest challenge every one of us has ever done. Tonight, we complete that challenge.”
So starts the first of six episodes of The End of an Era, the Disney+ documentary series that takes a look at the making of the Eras Tour — the largest in history, having been performed to 10 million fans at 149 concerts, earning billions of dollars. The project reviews how Swift invented and perfected the three-hour-plus machine, executed it in front of thousands of audience members every night in one of the world’s major cities, from Los Angeles to Mexico, Madrid to Vancouver. As her collaborators reveal, speaking directly to the camera, no one — not her, not anyone — could have known it would become the enormous global, social, cultural and economic phenomenon it did. Nor of the challenges they would face, like the attempted attack in Vienna that canceled three nights of the tour.
Swift emerges as the brains behind the operation, a tremendous perfectionist who controls every step of the production and, of course, her career. At the same time, she seems approachable, acknowledging the surreality of her life at times, and excited to rehearse, to be close to her fans, who often appear in the footage. Ultimately, the series was made to exalt her. But it also humanizes her, her mistakes, successes, nerves, decisions, problems and all. A year after the tour’s end, the documentary, made in collaboration with the Disney factory — two of its episodes will be released every Friday, plus footage from the last concert in Vancouver — may seem delayed or even opportunistic, in line with her latest album (the second released during or after the Eras Tour). But through its footage emerges a vision of how Swift’s own style characterizes her decisions. It’s all planned. The documentary starts shooting from the beginning, with that first day of rehearsals that took place three years ago, months before the tour started.
The first episode, Welcome to The Eras Tour, reveals the details of how the tour was created, with scenes from the singer’s life mixed in. It seems revelatory to watch Swift disappear from the stadium just seconds after ending a concert, get into a car, go to her hotel, fill up the bathtub, take off the false eyelashes and, she says, order room service and sign 2,000 albums before falling into bed, exhausted, at 4 a.m.
But the focus is really on the tour’s lowest moment, one of the worst of Swift’s life: when three planned concerts in Vienna are canceled in August 2024 after an attempted terrorist attack. One feels her fear, “like skating on thin ice or something,” she says. “We dodged, like, a massacre situation?” she recognizes, her voice breaking, remembering the terrorist attack that wasn’t thwarted at a Southport dance school in the UK just one week prior, in which a man with a knife attacked a group of young girls, killing three of them between the ages of six and 11.
“I’m going to meet some of those families today… It’s my job to be able to handle these feelings and then perk up immediately to perform, that’s just the way it’s got to be,” says Swift ironically, painfully, almost unable to vocalize the thoughts. It’s one of the most revealing moments of the documentary: she knows that what she does, important though it may be for millions of people, is at the end of the day a concert, not a matter of life and death. But also, that she has to give her all to her fans. After those tears, she realizes she can’t cry anymore, that it’s time to block out those feelings for the show’s three-and-a-half hours, to behave like “a pilot flying a plane,” who has to keep calm during turbulence. Her dancers and crew likewise recognize the importance of the show, its impact on the lives of so many. Likewise for them, it is a weighty responsibility to be there and perform.
It is revealed that Swift never landed in Vienna, that she was in the air when she found out about the plot and decided to cancel the appearances. That made the following shows in London — which closed the European leg of the tour — extremely important: she had to do them, but she also needed them to be over as soon as possible. “From a mental standpoint, being afraid something is going to happen to your fans at any moment, this is a new challenge,” she says while listening to an audiobook before the show. “I want to keep all the nerves I have away from the crowd, because when you’re sort of the ringleader of this show, they can sense any kind of shift energetically in you,” she explains, like the perfectionist she is. “You have to really focus on that and factor that in, that you’re at the Eras Tour, nothing’s wrong,” she tells her mother. “I am having a very physical reaction. It’s just weird. I just have to get this show over with. I am twitchy and fidgety,” she says. Her friend Ed Sheeran appears in the dressing room, and she tells him that after London, during her summer break, she wants to go where no one can find her. “I don’t want to be tracked like an animal, I’ve just felt very hunted lately,” she says.
Another difficult moment comes when she explains that on each of the five nights in London, before the concerts in Wembley Stadium, the artist met in private with the survivors and victims’ families from the tragic Southport attack. Afterwards, already dressed for the show, she’s seen walking down the hallway to her dressing room full of flowers, sobbing, alone.
“I know you helped them. I know it doesn’t seem like it but I know you helped them,” says her mother, the cameras filming from a discreet distance. “From a mental standpoint, I just do live in a reality that’s very unreal a lot of the time,” says the singer in a voiceover. Until the very moment she goes on stage, she is distraught, serious. But then comes the smile. And by the time the show is done, total happiness: “We’re back! That was the most fun,” she says.
In its first two 45-minute installments (the third and fourth will arrive December 19, the last two on December 26), the ins and outs of a very complex tour are examined, although perhaps not in the way that fans expected. For things like costume choice, surprise songs, the extension of concerts, and the writing of albums in the middle of a tour, we may have to wait. But some details can be glimpsed in the opening scenes: maps, plans, models, dozens of neatly arranged Post-it notes. The idea for the tour came to her two years before it came to pass, says Swift in her first on-camera interview, sharing that it stemmed from two “unpleasant” events. The first was when her first six albums were bought by a third party and she lost control of her music (in May, she got those rights back). She decided to re-record them, to remember “all the different girls” she had been when she first made them. “That planted a little seed… the idea of celebrating your past,” she says. “I think the second factor being the pandemic,” she continues, remembering how two of her albums were released amid the height of Covid. “What if I did a tour that celebrated all of these different moments in my life and career,” she muses, “where you have chapters divided up by albums and everything changes when the chapter changes?”
Her musicians harken back to the first rehearsals, when they didn’t yet know what the tour would be called. Even then, Swift was crystal clear on how she wanted things done. “It was three hours, it was crazy. I wondered what we were going to take out. We added three songs,” says the bass player, who practiced in the shower so as not to disturb the others. There are details on how the concert is put together, the platforms that raise and lower the singer, the underground automatic bullets she moves around on, and how a whole set of songs from her new album was incorporated into the second half of the concerts.
“Every person is the best one in the industry,” says Swift, who spends time praising her collaborators, like when she explains how Emma Stone recommended her La La Land choreographer Mandy Moore. While casting dancers, she made sure they were diverse, real people. In the second episode, Swift is shown signing wax-sealed letters for each member of her crew, in which she enclosed bonuses at the end of every leg of the tour (which lasted 20 months). “It’s like Christmas morning,” Swift says excitedly. The thrilled dancers are recorded as she gives them the envelopes, but though her messages are visible, the amount of money goes unseen. It is known that Swift gave $197 million in bonuses to her employees; the truck drivers alone got $100,000 each.
“We could have filled 255 stadiums,” says one of Swift’s agents, remembering how ticket sales took off back when there were only two dozen concerts announced, a number that was later raised to 150. Glendale, Arizona, where the tour kicked off, even temporarily assumed the name Swift City. Meanwhile, she rehearsed exhaustively to get ready for her fans. “Welcome to The Eras tour” was the phrase Swift used to greet her audiences every night.
The series’ footage includes several luminous, special moments, like her performance with Sheeran, with whom she has a close relationship and has been singing with for more than a decade. In the second episode come rehearsals and a performance with Florence Welch in London. Here appears a narrative that was picked up in the trailer: the two singers’ similarities, their hard work, sacrifice and the people who have their back — in Swift’s case, one of the latter is her mother, she says jokingly on a call to her fiancé, Travis Kelce. “Some people get a vitamin drip, I got this conversation,” she laughs.
There’s more interesting content in the first episode, about the tour and Swift herself, while the second is more focused on rehearsals and the dancers. Throughout it all, the singer is focused on the ultimate goal: making a perfect product for the fans, surprising them every night and keeping them excited. “There’s so many hundreds of moments of individual eye contact,” she says. “I see the mass quantities of joy that everyone’s feeling.”
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