A new documentary will chronicle the three-night run of concerts Taylor Swift had to cancel in Vienna in 2024 when authorities foiled an ISIS-inspired terrorist plot. Variety reports that the film, whose working working title is Taylor Swift Wien, will explore
“two vastly different youth subcultures: the inclusive, empowered world of the Swifties and a realm of toxic masculinity, fueled by online radicalization and a desperate need for validation.”
Andreas Pichler (Tesla Files) and Veronika Kaserer (Hunt for the Mafia – The ‘Ndrangheta in Germany) co-directed the doc. It will first air on the German network ZDF before an international rollout.
This past April, a 21-year-old Austrian man, identified as Beran A. due to Austria’s privacy laws, pleaded guilty to plotting to attack Swift’s concerts. (He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.) Authorities discovered a nearly finished bomb at his home. He had been preparing for the attack for at least a month, watching ISIS instructional videos. His goal, according to authorities, was to “kill as many people as possible outside the concert venue.” The concerts were expected to draw as many as 65,000 fans for the concert and an additional 30,000 outside listening. A second man received a 12-year sentence for encouraging the plot. Two others associated with the same terror cell also stood trial for unrelated allegations.
One of the film’s producers, Georg Tschurtschenthaler, told Variety that the doc would look at what transpired from multiple angles. One is a “ticking clock” procedural looking at how Austrian and German security agencies worked with the CIA and MI5 to stop the attack. Another looks at Vienna’s Swifties. As security experts told Rolling Stone at the time, cancelling the gig was “not a complicated decision.”
The filmmakers also follow three female fans as they process how and why the concerts were canceled, eventually forming a support group for others processing the anxiety surrounding the event. These Swifties met with Austrian police and the country’s then-chancellor, Karl Nehammer. At the time of the cancellations, the chancellor called losing the shows “a bitter disappointment” for fans.
The artist did discuss the plot, though, in her own docuseries, The End of an Era, which provided a backstage look at her run of stadium shows. “Never in my life did I think we would have a terrorist plot,” she said in the film. “We dodged a massacre.”
In August 2024, days after the cancellation, Swift sent a message to her fans explaining why she kept silence until she got to England for more tour dates. “The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows,” she wrote. “But I was also so grateful to the authorities because thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives. I was heartened by the love and unity I saw in the fans who banded together. I decided that all of my energy had to go toward helping to protect the nearly half a million people I had coming to see the shows in London.”
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