Taylor's Showgirl

Photo Credit: TAS Rights Management

Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl launch weekend rakes in $33 million at the box office, alongside 2.7 million day-one album sales.

Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl launch has shown once again that it’s Taylor’s world and the rest of us are just living in it. The special album release event dwarfed the competition at the box office over the weekend, debuting to an impressive $33 million domestic and $13 million overseas. That’s a record-breaking number for what is neither a concert film nor a documentary, but a timed promotional event for the release of her new album.

The album dropped on Friday and is already setting records. After just one day, The Life of a Showgirl has secured the second-highest weekly sales for any album since tracking of such things began in the early 1990s. Billboard’s Luminate reported that the album sold 2.7 million copies on Friday alone.

That also breaks the record for the most records Taylor has ever sold in a week, which is also more than anyone else has ever sold—except for Adele. Adele still carries the crown for the most album sales in one week with 25, which sold 3.4 million copies in its first week, ten years ago. But Taylor still has five days left to try to break that record.

Further, The Life of a Showgirl also set a record for the most vinyl copies sold in a week, with 1.2 million. That record was also previously held by Swift, whose album last year, The Tortured Poets Department, sold 859,000 copies in its first week—which her new album has surpassed by over 300,000 in just a single day.

It’s worth pointing out that these first-day numbers all include pre-orders that were sold over a period of weeks before the album dropped, and Luminate’s data only accounts for the U.S. sales. These pre-orders include numerous variant editions, many of which were limited editions available on Swift’s website, which rapidly sold out.

Meanwhile, Target has the only retail exclusives, as well as the only ones that are still available; these include a vinyl variant and three CDs. Notably, this time around, all the variants differ only in packaging, and all copies contain the same 12 songs.

The release of a new Taylor Swift album wouldn’t be complete without a little drama sprinkled in, and The Life of a Showgirl is no exception. Fans have been speculating about who the star is referring to in the song “Actually Romantic,” which is a diss track about an unnamed fellow popstar—and the common social media consensus is that it’s Charli XCX.

That speculation has only intensified since Swift’s promotional film for the album notes that the track is “a love letter to someone who hates you.”

Swift didn’t expand on that, but she sarcastically thanked them for writing songs about how much they hate her, saying, “It’s flattering.”

Fans are therefore convinced that this is a response to Charli XCX’s song, “Sympathy is a Knife,” which is allegedly about Swift. Lyrics in that track mention feeling insecure about a woman who shows up backstage at her boyfriend’s concert. The boyfriend in question is Charli’s now-husband, George Daniel, drummer for The 1975, whose frontman Matty Healy is a Taylor Swift ex.

However, neither singer has confirmed whether their songs are about one another.