Anne Hathaway’s massive year of 2026 movies starts next week with the release of A24’s Mother Mary, and it’s an exciting turn for the Oscar winner into the world of pop stars. In the upcoming movie, Hathaway plays a famed singer who orchestrates a comeback (and releases some inner demons) with her former designer, played by Michaela Coel. It turns out, the concerts in the movie were actually inspired by one of Taylor Swift's tours. As a Swiftie, I’m loving how Mother Mary was influenced by the singer.
In a new interview with Empire, Mother Mary writer/director David Lowery shared how Taylor Swift fit into the filmmaking process, and it’s a lot. In his words:
Her Reputation concert film is one of the best concert films ever. It's truly phenomenal. And for our concert sequences we looked at that repeatedly. You would not believe the amount of time we were talking about Taylor.
Mother Mary was in the making for seven years, making Taylor Swift’s Reputation concert film the perfect resource for the filmmaker. The film sadly left Netflix back in 2023, but these days there’s even more concert footage from Swift with the Eras Tour movie and Disney+ docuseries.
As a Swiftie myself, I love that the filmmaker is giving the Reputation era its flowers because it really was a huge moment for the pop star that feels perfect to inspire a supernatural A24 movie. As he continued:
We took three songs from Reputation and broke it down, shot by shot, and looked at them like, ‘Okay, if we were doing these, how much would these shots cost to do in visual effects?’ We used that as a budgeting tool, because we didn't know how to wrap our heads around actually pulling off a stadium concert-show on a minimal budget. We were literally using Reputation as a guide. I can go on about Reputation all day.
It’s pretty amazing how the Reputation Tour was so helpful to Mother Mary, and as someone who has seen it already, I could definitely see how that tour specificly was a reference point to the movie. David Lowery also said this:
When we wrapped, Annie [Hathaway] gave me a Taylor Swift style beaded bracelet with ‘Anti-Hero’ on it. I definitely brought a lot of Taylor Swift to the table in terms of who Mother Mary was. I would often would be like, ‘Imagine Taylor Swift in ten or 15 years – that’s sort of who this character could be.’
Now I have to wonder if Taylor Swift will see Mother Mary and have anything to say about it. And I also need to know what songs Anne Hathaway was listening to while playing the role of Mother Mary. You can check out the Mother Mary trailer here:
Looks spooky, right? While Anne Hathaway’s new movie definitely is its own thing and doesn’t feel explicitly like Taylor Swift, one could also compare her pop star character to Lady Gaga or Lorde; it definitely only makes me more intrigued by the concept with this context in mind. Oh, and it has another Taylor Swift connection, given that the singer’s frequent collaborator, Jack Antonoff, wrote some of the music Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary sings alongside Charli XCX and fka twigs.
Mother Mary hits theaters on April 17. It’s one of five films from the actress this year, who’s also in The Devil Wears Prada (May 1), The Odyssey (July 17), The End of Oak Street (August 13) and Verity (October 2). However, right now, she's in her Reputation era, and you can see it on the big screen very soon.
