Taylor Swift should star in a fantasy movie

And write, direct and bankroll it – why not?

This is a Taylor Swift video.

This is another:

This is a third:

Watched them? Good. Now consider the following: why hasn’t Taylor Swift made a fantasy movie yet?

I’m tipping my hand pretty early in this post: I think she should. I think it would be great, for her, for her fans, and – if done right – for people who like fantasy movies. Look at those videos. All the visual ingredients are there: the Grimm-inspired magic golden thread, the doorway hidden in the bowels of the willow, the chateau towers, the dark capes with the hoods. A beautiful, Americanized take on the ancien regime crossed with a chilled, children-in-a-pie fairytale whimsy.¹ That second video, for “…Ready For It?” is really more cyberpunk than fantasy, more Ghost in the Shell, but somehow Swift has still found a way to dress up like a witch and throw blue lightning bolts around the place. She clearly loves this stuff. She has an eye for it. And she’s got a billion dollars to spend, so why not? Fuck it, you could even stunt-cast Travis Kelce as some sort of half-orc paladin-barbarian, if you liked. Matty Healy could cameo as a goblin type. I’m just spitballing here.

I’ll level with you: I don’t always get the hype around Swift. I’d describe her music as “temperate”; nobody has really yet been able to explain to me why it’s her, and not some other twenty- or thirtysomething singer-songwriter, who has achieved quite the level of fame that she has. Because that fame is astounding. Taylor Swift is the most omniculturally present artist in the world since circa 2010-era Beyoncé. She’s the stuff of cringeworthy New York Times op-eds, of entreaties to U.S. presidential endorsements, the go-to name that middle-aged people drop when they want to seem relevant.² Mid-market universities try to stand out from the crowd by holding gimmicky conferences on her. The city of Liverpool has set up an 11-piece public art trail to mark her upcoming shows at Anfield. There are blogs and forums, tens of thousands strong, dedicated to speculating about her sexuality. (Sometimes, I think even Taylor Swift is a bit shocked by Taylor Swift’s fame.)

There have been attempts to explain the phenomenon, of course. A few weeks ago, the very excellent comedy podcast BudPod half-seriously suggested that her popularity was down to the fact that her music resembled another thing that Swift’s main demographic – Millennial white women – really like: true crime. I think this is a decent take. There are villains and motives to unpick within her discography, and the stories told within it follow an attractive and charismatic protagonist who manages to survive every time (she “survives” the bad boyfriends, doofus). According to this school of thought, our would-be killers are the likes of Matty Healy and Jake Gyllenhaal, and the crime scene is everywhere there are paparazzi or people with smartphones; Taylor is our final girl.

I don’t think that’s quite right, though. Or more accurately – I think that could be right, to an extent, but that Taylor Swift’s music actually more closely resembles a different form of media. To my mind, her music is actually popular for the same reasons as Young Adult fiction.

Young Adult books, or YA, in case you aren’t au fait with publishing categories, is a genre of fiction within the industry broadly aimed at teenagers but read by underdeveloped adults. If you’ve heard of The Hunger Games, Twilight, The Fault In Our Stars, Throne of Glass, Empyrean – all fit the YA label. Like Swift’s music, YA novels are angsty, focused on one’s place in the world, relationship-driven, but ultimately kind of chaste (at least until recently). Like Swift’s lyrics, the less-good YA fiction shows rather than tells; like her songwriting, it’s broadly linear rather than painterly. In a word, Swift writes romantasy songs.

And her fans are the same as YA fans, too (as in, I think they are often the same people). At their worst³, Swifties can share all the behaviours that make YA readers a force to be reckoned with: sections of the fandom can be vindictive, emotionally brittle and over-protective of their creators to the point of risking smothering them. They are exactly the people who not only wouldn’t – for better or worse – read JK Rowling any more because of her transphobia, but would scream at her, call her a cunt and a bitch on Twitter because of it; just look at how some of them reacted when Swift was dating a man they didn’t approve of. It’s often observed that YA series focus on teenagers who are categorised by society as they reach adulthood, only for the heroes of each series to throw off the labels applied to them (think Divergent, The Hunger Games, et cetera). Well – look at how it’s recently become the norm for fans to dress up as one of Swift’s ten different musical “eras” on her current eponymous tour. The gig-goers are literally sorting themselves into houses based on her music. Taylor Swift and Harry Potter share a fandom: Q.E.D. It all works.

So – that’s the market for the film. A huge market, comprised of her fanbase. What, then, would it look like? In my mind, the Untitled Taylor Swift Film Project would take the shape of something like Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, or Snow White and the Huntsman. Think high fantasy-lite, without too much lore to get stuck into, and definitely no violence against women or children. It’s closer to The Hobbit than House of the Dragon, but elegant. It would be funny, too – I think that Taylor can do humour, she just chooses not to.⁴

All four of the films/series mentioned above are pretty CGI-heavy (to varying effect), and Taylor’s would be too, I reckon. She would absolutely have to write the script, with the help of a good team (who’s the Jack Antonoff of Hollywood? Judd Apatow?) and there would have to be something meta-textual in there, something that tied the concept of the movie to her own life or music. Because she does nothing if it doesn’t have a nod to the fans, something for them to parse and discuss (and, perhaps, to project onto). Again: true crime.

Which brings us, finally, to the question of context. Why would Taylor Swift, who is currently at the peak of her powers, hitting five continents on the first live tour to break $1 billion, want to sack off that momentum to go sit on a film set for six months? Well – maybe she just wants a break. She’s done it before. From March 2016 to August 2017, following the whole Kim-and-Kanye “Famous” debacle, Swift took a hiatus from making music and touring, leading to a three-year gap between albums (1989 and Reputation).

This wasn’t the first time the most famous singer in the world disappeared from the public eye, nor would a hypothetical movie make Swift the first to move into acting after said hiatus. In 1958, Elvis Presley was the most recognisable man in the USA. He’d sold millions of records and achieved breakout success singing rock’n’roll music – black music – for white people in a way you might argue Swift initially did country music for non-country fans. And then Elvis was drafted, spent two years living in Germany, and when he came back, he pivoted – out with rock’n’roll, out with hip thrusts, and in with Blue Hawaii and Ann-Margret and Viva Las Vegas.

The one thing that’s different between now and the 1960s is that Taylor Swift isn’t beholden to music labels or film companies in order to reach her fans in the way Elvis once was (nor is she managed by Colonel Parker, though can you imagine?). At a time when cinema attendance is only ensured by franchise loyalty and adaptations of existing IPs, studios would be desperate to take her film on. She could write, direct and score the thing, and then she could make five more, if she wanted. Or it could be a one-off. She’s powerful enough within the entertainment industry (as in, probably the most powerful person) to decide for herself.

She’s got enough money. She’s got the fanbase. She’s got the tone of voice, and the aesthetic. So why not?

1. The video for “Bejeweled” – where Swift literally plays Cinderella – is too on the nose and self-aware even for this point, so I’ll link to it here, because Haim are very funny in the preamble (“Shut up, wench!”)

2. I would not be the first to observe that if you need the endorsement of a country singer to help you beat a reality TV star in the race to become the most powerful man on earth, then something has gone very wrong with your democracy, and your country.

3. And I hasten to footnote here that this is a generalisation, and that most of the fanbase is surely very sane and well adjusted! And I’m talking about a group of literally hundreds of millions of people. But at their worst… you know?

4. It’s worth noting that Swift has actually been in a couple of movies so far, though... well, I haven’t seen the 2014 Jeff Bridges/Meryl Streep vehicle The Giver, but the trailer and 35% on Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t exactly fill me with anticipation (though guess what the IP is based on? That’s right: a YA novel).