published on August 09, 2024 in Celeb Gist

How the Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce story would play out in a movie

It looked like a scene straight out of “When Harry Met Sally” or “Notting Hill” or “Fever Pitch” or the swooniest parts of “Friday Night Lights,” which is probably why so many people on that site formerly known as Twitter said it felt like we were living through a rom-com.

The biggest pop star in the world rushing out onto the field and into the arms of her football star boyfriend after his big win. Travis Kelce warily clocking the cameras that surround them, while a giddy Taylor Swift tells him, “Who the f--- cares?” and kisses him anyway. The unabashed PDA. The ear-to-ear grins. The first declarations of the L-word that we, the audience, have seen. “I love you so much it’s not even funny” … SWOON. At least that’s what we think he said!

To any screenwriters watching, it was clear: If this is a rom-com then we’re still mid-second act. So many unknowns lie ahead. Our heroine is off to start the overseas leg of her Eras tour in Tokyo. Our hero is still gearing up for the biggest game of the year, the freaking Super Bowl! No one knows how the game will turn out, let alone if these two crazy kids can make it work — to see each other at the game, let alone for life.

There are a million ways this could end, so we called up a few screenwriters to ask them: How would you write Taylor and Travis’s third act? (Please remember, this is all speculation on what would happen if this were a movie, not what anyone believes will happen or wants to happen in real life!)

The (maybe not) meet-cute

“One thing I’m really sad about is that we cannot see the first act of this love story, you know, the actual physical meet-cute and the moments that led up to her first sitting-in-the-box public date,” says Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, the co-writer of “Legally Blonde,” “10 Things I Hate About You” and “She’s the Man.” After Kelce expressed interest in meeting Swift on his podcast, maybe her handler talked to his handler or both he and she put on cloaks and met under the cover of night in the turrets of a Scottish castle. One assumes they must have met up IRL once or twice before going public in September, right?

A more cynical read on that first act is to assume this started out as a mutually beneficial, manager-coordinated business arrangement to extend both parties’ four-quadrant reach, says Yulin Kuang — author of the novel “How to End a Love Story,” which comes out in April, and soon-to-be-director of the film version of Emily Henry’s “Beach Read,” which she adapted. In the movie version, Swift and Kelce probably hate each other at first and have agreed that the business arrangement will expire the week of the Super Bowl, but all that time together feels so wonderful and natural … and “they’re both feeling terrible but neither is brave enough to confess to the other one that it’s real for me now,” Kuang writes over email.

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Perhaps, though, we need to go in an entirely different direction — more Marvel Universe and less “Princess Diaries” — one that acknowledges Swift and Kelce as high-performance professional athletes and that holds respect for Swift as a formidable mastermind of her own career, says Jessica Bendinger, the writer of “Bring It On” and “Stick It,” two movies centered on young women in elite sports.

“[Taylor is] brilliant,” says Bendinger. “Her ability to plant Easter eggs for her fandom is on a par with game designers of the highest level.”

In her first act, Swift and Kelce meet when they discover they are both alien-human hybrids, enlisted to roll out disclosure of the UFO and UAP secrets. What better, more perfect-looking and agreeable beings to get people comfortable with the idea that aliens live among us? But then Swift turns on her puppet-master and releases a piece of merch that will reveal every Easter egg in the world, the “Truth-Telling Trifocals Limited Edition Headset,” which immediately sells out. Taylor Nation (the greatest detectives on Earth) team up with Chiefs Kingdom to expose every capital S secret on the planet — freeing us all from “the toxic chains of Deceptive Industrial Complexes.”

In other words, Swift saves humanity.

A true partnership, ripped asunder

Let’s go back to the quainter vision, where the highest stakes are whether Swift’s red lipstick will come off her face when she kisses her beau.

As we reach the dramatic cliffhanger end of Act 2, our lovers will of course have some kind of fight right before the Super Bowl, as happens in every good rom-com, usually based on a misunderstanding that could have been easily avoided if they were just better communicators or weren’t so darn afraid of getting hurt. “Act 2 ends with the lovers at odds, which hopefully is not happening to them in real life,” Smith says. There’s probably a protective friend on the team planting seeds that this girl is trouble, especially given her penchant for writing songs about her ex-boyfriends, and then something happens where it looks as if she will have to skip the big game.

Taylor and Travis — and everything you’re dying to know!

Jump to the airport. Our heroine pop star has made it back sometime in the middle of the first half. But Kelce thinks she’s blown him off. He’s devastated. He’s getting penalties, he’s fumbling the ball, he’s losing yards. Halftime comes and the Chiefs are down. Cut to outside the stadium, Swift is racing to get there and there’s so much mayhem she can’t get inside. So she has to don an insane costume, but it’s so good that no one believes her when she’s trying to get to the locker room, saying, “It’s me, Taylor!”

And then, by chance, she runs into Tiësto, who, we’ve forgotten to tell you, has been popping up in this story the whole time as a kind of fairy godfather (he was scheduled to perform at the actual game, but dropped out). He recognizes Swift’s crazy Mrs. Roper costume from a Halloween party and starts guiding her through the crowd. As is Swift’s M.O., perhaps she jumps into some kind of equipment cart to hide, but suddenly it’s being wheeled out onto the field for the halftime show, and she pops out like it’s a birthday cake and interrupts the performance.

We’re okay with this because the headliner — who in this timeline is not Usher — is a male misogynist, who must then huff away because the crowd is going nuts for our heroine. Kelce is in the locker room when he hears that she’s there. He comes running out. She grabs the microphone. “In the movie version, she has to say something vulnerable that she’s never said, or has to apologize. She has to bare her soul,” says Smith. And then she starts singing their favorite country song, the one they do when they buy out an entire bar to do karaoke. Someone hands him a mic “and he sings back in this beautiful moment across the stadium,” says Smith. “And they finally merge together midfield and kiss, as the a--hole main stage performer is just sitting there stewing; ... It’s Kanye, but we’re not naming names.”

Alternate endings

Satisfying ending! Very ’90s rom-com! But let’s back up a second and check out door No. 2, which takes us back into Bendinger’s “Twilight Zone” surreality. Having liberated humanity — using the combined intelligence of both Swifties and tailgating bros who do keg-stands shirtless in 5-degree weather — Swift and Kelce are now ready for their happy ending. “Perverse incentives vanquished, Taylor and Travis hybridize happily ever after … spawning triplets into the Tadpole Galaxy and beyond,” writes Bendinger. (The Tadpole Galaxy is, for real, the largest disrupted spiral galaxy of its kind. It’s also the perfect place for our alien-human hybrids to keep procreating without ever worrying about stretch marks or swollen ankles.)

Or, maybe try out Kuang’s more grounded version behind door No. 3.

In the big game Kelce pulls off a heroic move and is injured. It’s bad. Perhaps career-ending. (NO ONE wants this to happen. This is only for the movie!) Swift runs to his hospital bed and stays there for days until he wakes up. But neither of them can express their true feelings, and they go their separate ways, back to their normal worlds. “She’s doing pop-star things, but like, with minor-key music in the background of this entire montage,” Kuang writes. “He’s doing a lot of like, staring bleakly at his teammates’ practices, while he sits with his injury on ice from the sidelines. There’s probably a deep conversation with his former coach/mentor, who in my head is played by Sam Elliott.”

Time passes, seasons change. And then one day way in the future at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville — where Swift really did start her career, playing for the first time when she was 14 — the door opens. “This Random Handsome Old Man gets onstage and sings the most heartbreaking country song you’ve never heard,” Kuang writes. “It’s about how he was once a football star, and he fell in love with a star beyond his reach, and he wanted to say something, but something that seems stupid now always got in the way, and now he’s older, and wiser, and he’s realized that it’s too late to say anything at all … unless it isn’t?”

Our singer-songwriter emerges from the shadows. She owns the cafe now, by the way, and is now played by Meryl Streep. Those days of superstardom or whatever nonsense got in the way before are now gone. In Kuang’s version, she has to ask her blond assistant who that man is, and they check the roster and realize it is Kelce, now faded and gray.

But in the version in my head, she recognizes his voice, and his eyes, from across the room. She looks up as she’s wiping down the bar. In an instant, they both flash back through a mashup of our three screenwriters’ imaginations, through a business arrangement that went bad, through a big fight, through a magical duet and kiss at the halftime show, through galaxies and hundreds of little tadpole children. All possibilities through space and time have led them to this moment, with the setting sun pouring through a window on an afternoon in Nashville.

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