Profile for JamesBelsey

He's a fair way down this list as it doesn't take into account changes in cast, only grosses for the first year of a show for the original cast members.

Without having data for each show with actual cast members for every performance, it's impossible to get a completely accurate picture. Even then, it's still not an exact science.

Ok, so I think I've come up with a metric that does a reasonable job of measuring the box office impact of individual actors now.

The metric is calculated using the first year of grosses for the show, then attributing them to the actors based on their billing from IBDB. If they're top or second billed, they get all of the grosses attributed to them, 3rd and 4th get half, 5th and 6th get a third etc. (i.e. First year grosses / Ceiling(Billing Number/2))  . This seems to get rid of a lot of the noise and come up with a reasonable list of actors and grosses as shown below.


The only major issue I've noted with this approach, is those shows that have alphabetical billing.

Thanks for all the input on this, especially @HogansHero. It's been fun investigating it further.

Thanks Hellob, the challenge here is that the cast of shows is not fixed, so, particularly in the case of long running shows like Phantom, I was attributing grosses to actors that have not been in the show to 20 years. I think doing it based on the first year of the show is probably reasonable. I'm currently working on adding a factor based on the actor's billing on the show, which should help get a better view of this, but will still not be perfect.

Agreed, if there were a data source that showed the leads for each show for the last 30 years, that would be great.

I just had a thought about removing them from the analysis where their character is 'Ensemble', which would help, but for Charlie, that wouldn't really help as of his seven roles, only one is listed as 'Ensemble', the others are character descriptions, such as 'Angel', 'Addams Ancestor' or 'Telephone Repairman'



IBDB does list the cast in order, so I could use that, but it's then impossible to work out at which point to cut off. I could use the first 1, 2, 4 listed, first x% etc. but it's not an exact science. I might have a play with that though to see what comes out.

 

This is now up to date with the current weeks grosses.

Looks like Hamilton will pass Spider-Man Turn Off The Dark next week to become the 18th highest grossing musical since 1984 (22nd when accounting for inflation)

Thanks for all the feedback on this.

The data should be updated sometime today to reflect the grosses up to today.

I've created a new metric to replace bankability that associates the grosses for the first year of a show to the actor. The results of this are below:

This seems to make more sense to have Nathan Lane be at the top, but I'm not sure about the others. Any thoughts on a good name for the metric? I agree that 'bankability' isn't right as there could be people that have just been lucky and been in the ensemble of a number of high grossing shows that are brought to the top here, but I can't think of anything better than 'First year grosses by actor' at the moment.

Thanks again for all the great feedback.

James.

It's $1.8 billion. Not sure why it's showing 'T', I'll look into that...

If you click on any of the values (when using a desktop browser), you'll see the information associated with what you've clicked on.

For example, if you click on 'Andrew Lloyd Webber', you'll then see all the shows that he wrote, along with the associated grosses, actors etc.

Here's something I've been working on for a little while...

https://webapps.qlik.com/broadway/index.html?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=BroadwayApp&sourceID1=Social_Twitter_BroadwayApp#/home/

It contains data for every weeks Broadway grosses since 1984. The link above takes you to a nicely formatted overview of the data, provides some insights and allows for some analysis of the results.

If you're interested in more interactivity and analysis, you can access the underlying app here: https://sense-demo.qlik.com/sense/app/7f7aa30e-656a-44fe-b5fd-bf8e682976eb

If you have any feedback on things you'd like to see in the data, let me know.

James.

Something I haven't seen picked up yet is that with this last week's grosses, Wicked passed Phantom to become the 2nd highest grossing Broadway show of all time (not accounting for inflation). That's pretty amazing!

I also saw this a couple of days ago at a preview screening in Australia and loved every second.

The soundtrack and score are available on Apple Music/Spotify etc, now. In Australia, the John Legend track isn't available on Spotify, not sure if that's the same elsewhere though.