Beyoncé Swaps Flying Car for Levitating Horse Following Technical Mishap on Cowboy Carter Tour
Saddle up, Atlanta — Beyoncé‘s Cowboy Carter Tour has officially kicked off its run of shows in Georgia, featuring a brand new flying horse prop that gallops over the crowd.
As debuted at the superstar’s first concert in ATL on Thursday (July 10), Bey now rides a golden animatronic stallion while performing “16 Carriages.” She previously sang the Cowboy Carter single on a levitating car each night, but following a technical mishap with the vehicle a few shows back, it looks like the horse is here to stay.
In clips from the performance at Mercedes-Benz Stadium — where she’ll play three more shows July 11 and 13-14 — the 35-time Grammy winner effortlessly croons the lyrics to “16 Carriages” while straddling the robotic horse, whose legs actually move up and down as if it were prancing over the heads of concertgoers. Bey also showed off her new steed by sharing photos of the number on Instagram.
The kickoff show in the Peach State comes a couple of weeks after Bey experienced a rare technical difficulty on her well-oiled Cowboy Carter trek. During “16 Carriages” at her June 28 show in Houston, the vocalist’s red car started to tilt downward at a concerning angle while she was sitting in it, suspended many feet up in the air. Like a pro, Bey kept singing before eventually telling her crew to lower her down, later joking to the crowd, “If ever I fall, I know ya’ll catch me.”
“Tonight in Houston, at NRG Stadium, a technical mishap caused the flying car, a prop Beyonce uses to circle the stadium, and see her fans up close, to tilt,” Bey’s Parkwood Entertainment wrote in a statement afterward. “She was quickly lowered and no one was injured. The show continued without incident.”
Bey’s ongoing trek is absolutely flying by, with Atlanta marking the second-to-last stop on the route. Three months after kicking off the tour in Los Angeles on April 28, the Destiny’s Child alum will close out the run with two shows at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium on July 25 and 26.
The tour is also proving to be highly successful for the performer, whose 12 shows in May alone grossed $157.4 million with 567,000 tickets sold, according to Billboard Boxscore. It marks nearly the highest monthly gross ever reported to Boxscore in history, coming second only to Bey’s own 2023 record with the Renaissance Tour, which raked in $179.3 million that August.
Hannah Dailey
Billboard