Just days after her first official public appearance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, her fiancé, at her side, and just a couple of months before their expected wedding date, Taylor Swift gave her fans another milestone moment with the release of her newest music video, “Elizabeth Taylor.”
But the video immediately set off a debate among even Swift’s most ardent fans, largely due to the alleged amount of money she paid to obtain clips of the real-life Elizabeth Taylor from some of the late movie star’s greatest films. According to unconfirmed reports online, Swift shelled out at least $10 million for rights to include the film clips.
Swift released the video only on the Apple Music and Spotify Premium platforms, restricting its viewing to paying subscribers to one of those services.
“As a Taylor fan idk,” wrote one fan, @prfoundbond. “$10 million on a music video is crazy when thereâs people like, unable to survive rn.” (The “rn” abbreviation means “right now.”)
The clips of Elizabeth Taylor comprise the entire video. Swift herself does not appear in the three-minute, 46-second-long music video.
“If she just made a music video instead it could’ve been cheaper,” wrote another fan.
“I love you Taylor for life but you could have invested in another type of a music video,” wrote another on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
The fan reaction may have taken Swift by surprise, but some critical response was even stronger.
Video Called a ‘FanCam’
Many of Swiftâs younger fans may not know who the real-life Elizabeth Taylor was. Once the worldâs biggest female movie star, Taylor died in 2011 at the age of 79.
Over her lengthy Hollywood career, making her first appearance as a child actor in 1942 in the film National Velvet, Taylor went on to star in numerous landmark Hollywood films throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including the epic Cleopatra, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and many others.
She earned two Oscars, winning one for her 1960 role in Butterfield 8, and another six years later for Virginia Woolf.
But while Swift’s video reintroduces Elizabeth Taylor for a contemporary audience, the film-clips-only approach led one critic at New York Magazine to label the video “basically a Fan Cam.”
The new video “lacks the drama and narrative of her last two videos off of Showgirl. Instead, it is functionally a fan cam of the actress,” wrote pop culture correspondent Fran Hoepfner. “Itâs nice, maybe, that Swift recognizes that her imitation wouldnât hold a candle to the iconic actress, but what the ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ video mostly shows us is that Swift is maybe using her time away from touring and wedding prep to teach herself Final Cut Pro.”
$10 Million Cost Not Confirmed
Did Swift really pay $10 million for rights to brief excerpts from such films as Father of the Bride, A Place in the Sun, Boom! and Suddenly, Last Summer? Though the figure is circulating on social media, no professional media outlets have yet verified that number.
What is certain, however, is that such clips from classic films do not come cheap, especially for use by a star like Taylor Swift. Typically, licensing fees can start at $3,500 per seven-second clip. But in a project as high-profile as a Taylor Swift video, costs could run much higher, with the low millions being a plausible amount.
Like Heavy Sports’s content? Be sure to follow us.
This article was originally published on Heavy Sports
The post Taylor Swift Makes Big Career Move Before Kelce Wedding, Dividing Fans appeared first on Heavy Sports.