Taylor Swift accepts the Artist of the Year award onstage during the 2022 American Music Awards at Microsoft Theater on November 20, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.
Kevin Winter | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
If this was a movie, indeed.
Taylor Swift has only just begun an Oscar campaign for her short film “All Too Well,” and she’s already struck a deal with Disney to make her feature directorial debut.
The singer-songwriter has written an original script that will be produced by Searchlight Pictures, the studio behind best picture winners like “Slumdog Millionaire,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Birdman” and “The Shape of Water.”
Swift has directed eight of her own music videos since 2020 before writing and directing the 14-minute “All Too Well: The Short Film,” which is eligible for a nomination for the 95th annual Academy Awards. The short film is based on Swift’s song “All Too Well” and follows a manipulative boyfriend played by Dylan O’Brien and a young woman played by Sadie Sink as they fall in love and ultimately have a devastating breakup.
Oscar nominations will be announced Jan. 24.
The news of Swift’s feature film directorial debut comes just a few months after the singer made history as the only solo artist to win two best direction awards at MTV’s Video Music Awards. She is also the first artist to win three video of the year awards and only the second woman to direct the winning video for best longform video.
More recently, Swift made headlines after Ticketmaster bungled the pre-sale ticketing of her upcoming Eras tour.
Ticketmaster, owned by Live Nation, was supposed to open up sales for 1.5 million verified Taylor Swift fans last month ahead of general public ticket sales. However, more than 14 million users flocked to the site, including bots, spurring massive delays and lockouts on the site. Ultimately, 2 million tickets were sold during the presale and the general public sale was canceled, company representatives said.
The fiasco led The House Energy and Commerce Committee to pen a letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino asking the executive to clarify Live Nation’s ticketing process for the Eras tour and provide a list of actions the company will take to ensure consumers will have better access to live entertainment in the future.
Swift, who has worked to bring all marketing in house, publicly slammed the company for mishandling the sales process, albeit without mentioning it by name.
“I’m not going to make excuses for anyone because we asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could,” she wrote in an Instagram post last month. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them.”