Synopsis: Two November 2025 nights at Paris’s Accor Arena, shot with more than sixty cameras, capturing a career-spanning setlist wrapped inside the tour’s science-fiction staging.
Stars: Katy Perry
Director: Paul Dugdale
Rated: NR
Running Length: 132 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: A concert film that plays like catching a distracted artist on a busy night, with shaky vocals and crowd work that curls your toes. Then Firework arrives and reminds you exactly why she became Katy Perry. 
Katy Perry Lifetimes Tour Review: A Lot Was Happening
The Lifetimes Tour was Katy Perry‘s fifth, built around her seventh album, 2024’s 143. It opened in Mexico City on April 23, 2025 and closed in Abu Dhabi on December 7 after 91 shows. If that were the whole story, nobody would have blinked. A pop star juggling a punishing schedule with life as Orlando Bloom’s partner and mother to their five-year-old is not news.
That wasn’t the whole story.
In June 2025, Perry and Bloom separated. On December 6, one day before the tour ended, she and former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau confirmed they were dating. And she’d started the whole run less than ten days after flying into space with Blue Origin’s all-female crew.
So by the time the cameras arrived in Paris that November, a lot was happening.
Caught on a Busy Night
Maybe that’s why Paul Dugdale‘s capture feels less like a meticulously planned concert film. It plays more like we dropped in on a night she wasn’t expecting company. The performance often reads as effortful rather than natural, and it misses the party-girl spirit that has always been Perry’s best asset.
The trippy visuals and elaborate costumes are all present. The costumes, though, feel borrowed. P!nk’s and Lady Gaga’s designers should book a matinee and see if anything looks familiar. More to the point, Perry doesn’t always look like she’s enjoying wearing them.
There’s a sense of someone trapped inside a bubble-gum, candy-pop lane while being pulled somewhere darker. Her recent material shows that pull, and it’s no surprise those are the tracks critics have warmed to, even when longtime fans haven’t. They want her to stay in a Teenage Dream while she wants to explore an adult version of herself. At some point she’s going to have to be brave enough to actually flip that switch.
The staging doesn’t help her case. The show hangs on a science-fiction storyline with Perry as a mechanized cyborg fighting a rogue A.I. to save the world’s butterflies. It’s the kind of concept an artist reaches for when she wants a through-line and hasn’t decided what the line is about.
The Vocals Are the Problem
I’m also not sure how strong she is vocally here, and that’s odd for a release engineered for IMAX speakers. If I were putting this into premium large-format rooms, there are notes on this soundtrack I would never let through.
Perry’s vibrato has always been something you adjust to. Here she lands flat more than once and comes into verses sharp. Some artists are better live than on record. I’ve always thought Perry was the reverse.
None of that is a small ask on a stage this size, and arena pop has run on backing tracks for decades. That’s part of the point. A film selling you the front row should either deliver the voice or be honest about the trade.
The technical team gives her every advantage, for what it’s worth. Dan Winterburn served as vision mixer, which on a sixty-camera shoot is the credit that decides what you actually watch. Leslie Atkins and Simon Bryant cut it, Jacob McKee graded it, and Peter Dyer handled score, mix and sound design. The film looks terrific. That’s the problem in miniature: everything around the singing is working hard.
Pasta Man
Then there’s the crowd work.
When it’s time to talk to the audience, Perry adopts a wide-eyed, kewpie-doll voice. She addresses her Parisian crowd in broken French, entertaining herself more than the people in front of her. It reaches its peak during a bit where she brings fans up on stage. One says he’s from Italy. She immediately christens him Pasta Man.
Oof.
Then "Firework" Arrives
This is a show called The Lifetimes Tour, so Perry has a lot of ground to cover, and fans wanting to hear a range of material will be pleased. The hits are here alongside deeper cuts. We all know which song it’s building toward, and she tells the audience outright that they’ll have to wait for it.
And then, finally, “Firework” arrives, and everything clicks.
The shaky vocals, the odd costumes and the awkward crowd work all fall away for a few minutes. So does the sense of inertia where there should be momentum. Perry wrote songs that are close to impossible to resist when they hit you right, and that’s one of them.
It reminds you why Katy Perry became Katy Perry. She knows how to build an enormous, ridiculous, joyful pop song that burrows in, lifts you and gets an entire arena singing. Maybe that’s the version we’re still waiting to see again. The one who doesn’t need the biggest costume or the strangest visual, because the song is already enough.
She just needs to trust that again.
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