The biggest show on the planet made its US finale this weekend. The last US shows of The Eras Tour took place in Indianapolis on Nov. 3, handily selling out Lucas Oil Stadium for three nights in a row and drawing well over 200,000 Swifties to the city.
With a little over a month before the tour wraps up its last Canadian leg, it’s impossible to overstate anything about the Eras Tour. The scale of the production, the level of talent and athleticism on display, the cultural and economic impact – Taylor Swift has done her best to raise the bar for the entire entertainment industry.
By a large margin it’s become both the highest-grossing concert tour in history with the highest-grossing concert film in history. With Swift standing tall as one of the final bastions of a fading monoculture, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to view this tour as this generation’s Woodstock. But for all of its storied cultural influence, Woodstock only drew about 500,000 people. That’s just a couple weekends' work for Swift, who has been touring this show around the world for nearly a year and a half now. The impact of The Eras Tour is, quite literally, incomparable to anything that's come before it, making its final US dates all the more memorable for fans in attendance.
As one of the final shows in the tour, few surprises were left for audiences in Indianapolis. Swift has her rotating secret songs that she plays at each show, and fans always get a kick out of the moment dancer Kameron Saunders ad-libs a new line at each show. But for the most part the final US dates of The Eras Tour were a lot like every other date. These performances have been documented in exquisite detail in the concert film, except for the new act added in May for her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department. She could’ve easily spared some expense in adding these new songs to an already successful tour, but that wouldn’t live up to her reputation.
The new act features Swift performing parts of seven songs from her latest album while becoming possessed and levitating, being abducted by aliens, receiving treatment in a mental facility, dancing across a tilting platform styled as a bedframe, joining a marching band and eventually going fully limp for two of her dancers to perform a vaudeville skit with her body. And again, all of this is extra material added onto the tour after it had already been seismically successful.
For a woman that could sell out a stadium with just an acoustic guitar and a microphone, Taylor Swift is doing the most to make sure her fans aren’t just satisfied, but overwhelmingly so.
The only fans left wanting were those that couldn’t get tickets. In the hours leading up to each show, resale tickets couldn’t be found for less than $2000 for even the worst, most obstructed seats. Unlike other cities where fans without tickets have congregated outside the venue to listen, Indianapolis kept the sidewalks around Lucas Oil Stadium clear. The closed-roof stadium kept the music contained, leaving the thousands of Swifties still seeking tickets to rely on fans' live streams to watch the show.
The Eras Tour will officially end next month after two more Canadian stops, allowing for a chance to finally tally the receipts and certify the records its set for gross and attendance. Once these records are set, expect them to stand for a long time. It remains to be seen what caliber of artist could possibly challenge this monumental tour, but it won’t be happening any time soon. That will have to wait for another era of entertainment, because this era belongs to Taylor Swift.