Katy Perry’s new concert film has reportedly taken about £21,000 at the UK box office, roughly £140 for each of the 150 cinemas that showed it. The figure comes from press reports rather than a published gross: at the time of writing, neither the distributor nor a box-office tracker has released a confirmed UK total. It deserves attention anyway, because the verified facts around it make it plausible, and they are more interesting than the jokes.
The film is Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour – Live from Paris. It was filmed over two sold-out nights at the Accor Arena in Paris in November 2025 with a 60-camera set-up, runs 132 minutes and was directed by Paul Dugdale. It premiered at the Tribeca Festival in New York on 8 June 2026. Trafalgar Releasing opened it in cinemas in 70 countries on 2 September, with more than 150 UK cinemas booked for a limited run. UK tickets went on sale on 30 July.
Do the arithmetic before the jokes
Take the reported £21,000 at face value. Spread across 150 cinemas, that is about £140 each, a handful of tickets per venue at event-cinema prices. One plausible reading is that the film’s natural audience had already paid once, for the tour itself.
The Lifetimes Tour was a commercial success. According to Billboard’s figures from January, it played 91 shows, sold about 1.05 million tickets and grossed more than $134 million, making it Perry’s second highest-grossing tour after the Prismatic World Tour. It opened in Mexico City in April 2025, played six dates in China and closed in Abu Dhabi in December. The UK was on the route too, with dates in Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham and London. For many fans, a concert film is a way to see a show they missed rather than a second visit to one they attended.
Event cinema is a hard business
This is the part the headline skips. Concert films in cinemas depend on concentrated demand over a short window. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour film, which grossed about $267 million worldwide, is the exception every other release is measured against. Billie Eilish’s 3D tour film, co-directed with James Cameron, took about $26.7 million worldwide. Perry’s own Katy Perry: Part of Me made $32.7 million in 2012.
Against those numbers, a limited run in 150 UK cinemas, with tickets on sale about five weeks before opening, looks less like a failed blockbuster and more like a small event release. £21,000 is a bad headline. Whether it is a bad piece of business depends on figures that have not been published.
The tour did its real work elsewhere
There is one more figure worth setting beside the box office. The Lifetimes Tour raised £81,918 for Music Venue Trust in the UK, nearly four times the film’s reported UK takings, and $264,814 for Perry’s Firework Foundation. The Trust’s money arrived at a hard time: 30 grassroots music venues closed permanently between July 2024 and July 2025. Meanwhile Perry’s compilation The Ones That Got the Plays has been certified gold in the UK, with 103,285 album-equivalent units as of September.
None of that describes an artist in decline. It describes an artist whose audience shows up in arenas and on streaming services, and for this film, in this market, the cinema was the wrong room.
Box-office note: the £21,000 UK figure comes from press reports and is presented here as a report, not a confirmed gross. Other figures are drawn from Billboard, NME, Music Week, Official Charts and the film’s release materials.
