Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour – Live from Paris (dir. Paul Dugdale)
One of the curious dichotomies of Katy Perry is that she can be an incredible pop star while contending with the fact that she is kinda boring. Star can command a stage, but in 2026 lacks the ongoing curiosity factor that is so important for anybody two decades into a career like hers. It is easy to say that she lucked out with one mega-successful album and has merely continued to ride that into whatever peculiar position she holds today in popular culture. But a quick glance of the setlist for her 2025 “Lifetimes Tour" shows that shouldn’t be the case. And yet for all the fizzy, electric pop songs in her catalogue, most of which translate very well to the performance stage, Perry herself never quite sells The Katy Perry Project as something to really engage with on a human level.
Which brings us to Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour – Live from Paris, captured by Paul Dugdale who did some great, fun things with Taylor Swift: The Reputation Tour and Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert. The tour was, in essence, built around the music and supposed themes of her 2024 album 143, which was a soulless late-career attempt at appealing to the sound of now (a dig, yes, but most popstars with a 10-year+ career have at least one), but which basically just plays like the generic up-tempo playlist from your local franchise gym. As a result, Perry works overtime here to compensate for the lack of new hit songs, throwing heart-hand symbols in the air and giving her usual campy spectacle (albeit somewhat flatter than usual, I felt), and, blessedly, falling back on stone cold classic tracks and giving those featured new songs a bass-heavy gloss for the crowd that likely aren’t as familiar with them.
From what I can see, the tour was a good time. Watching from home with headphones on (instead of at IMAX, where I'm sure it was a treat) and I’m not ashamed to say I got up in the living room and danced like nobody was watching (because they weren’t). Dugdale does a flashy job disguising some of the chintzier elements of the stage production like the rather barren stage (and don’t get me started on that ugly “butterfly”!), utilising the show’s computer game aesthetic to submit viewers into a frenzy of lightwork and spinning choreography. The latter of which is made more obvious due to the figure-eight stage set. It’s hardly Madonna: Drowned World Tour 2001 with its turn-of-the-millennium fusion of cyber tech, action choreography and personal introspection, but not much is. That being said, I’ve certainly seen less invigorating filmed representations of pop concerts. Dugdale, it should be noted, thankfully avoids too much of the up-close crowd reaction content that was one of the more annoying elements of Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) (review here) from earlier this year. It might have been nice, however, for the film to dive a little deeper into what 143 meant to Perry (especially given its general dismissal by the public) and what the show's tech themes actually mean to her personally. "Artificial", which opens the concert alongside "Chained to the Rhythm", two highlights, is, in theory, about Artificial Intelligence and the need for human connection, but apart from a couple of audience participation moments, Perry rarely stops to allow anybody a moment to really consider what she's doing with her storytelling.
The sound design is probably the most impressive part of this filmed concert. The concert mix, with its amplified production of most songs, remixes and samples, is rendered fabulous and clear. Meanwhile, behind the scenes content—notably a chunk of pre-tour rehearsal content at the start and cutaways to Perry’s under-stage costume changes between concert acts—is modest, but the sort of expectedly crafty addition that gives a fuller scope of “The Lifetimes Tour” and pays necessary credit to many of the people involved in putting on a world tour such as this.
The poster for Katy Perry: The Lifetimes Tour exclaims, “They said I couldn’t. I did it. And I filmed it.” I don’t think anybody was ever really questioning that, although putting this concert doc together does put a big question mark over whether she will again. As she notes on stage, Perry is 41 years old (now 42), and she has never quite appeared as the sort of musician with such a defining, essential point-of-view or adeptness at shifting between genres, styles and audience demographics that a has given the likes of Madonna, Cher, Diana Ross, Kylie Minogue and others not just a second wind, but a third and fourth and fifth. She has no doubt reached a moment in her career that means she’ll always have some pop culture cache—you don’t sell over 150-million records and nine number ones on the Billboard Hot 100 and just sink into the total obscurity. Flop records be damned. Not for nothing, Katy Perry: Part of Me remains one of the stronger tour documentaries thanks in large part to her then-peak pop powers and the frank vulnerability she was able to show. She's done it before, she could do it again.
I enjoyed myself watching The Lifetimes Tour; it’s hard not to! I’d very likely watch another. Whether Perry is able to comeback with something to really say about life, about music, about the world, or find a new generational sound that positions her as exciting as she once was (or better yet, both!) remains to be seen. If this is the last of the large-scale high-concept concerts that Perry undertakes then at least we have this filmed version, which does its best to replicate the live experience for fans.
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