30 years of Broadway grosses visualised and analysed

Just Kaye, the most bankable actor. Good for her!!

Thanks for the feedback.

The 'bankable' metric is based on the total gross of shows that the actor was part of the cast in for opening night. In the case of Judy Kaye, it sums the grosses for Phantom, Mamma Mia, Ragtime, Nice Work if you can Get It and Souvenir. It would be nice to look at it week by week, with changing casts, but that information isn't available sadly.

If you click on actors in the most bankable section, it will select them, and show the associated data through the rest of the visualisation (this also applies for anywhere else you click, select a theatre to show all the shows from that theatre etc.)

Updated On: 6/9/17 at 08:25 PM

Most bankable composer - Andrew Lloyd Webber - 1.82 T - 

Wow...  and that's just broadway...

 

Fascinating

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.

Updated On: 6/9/17 at 10:11 PM

@JamesBelsey as I suspected, that metric does not measure "bankabilty" at all. It measures the long term fortunes of shows that a given person was in, not even limited to when they were in it. It in no way correlates to bankability, a term that of course makes sense in film, which is a static enterprise, but not here, in a constantly evolving enterprise. You are enhancing Ms. Kaye, as an example, every week for the revenue of a show she has not been in this century. That's a meaningless stat and to me it undercuts the enormous amount of good stats you've assembled. I could detail the obvious anomalies, but you are obviously smart enough to play this out. 

That would obviously be slightly better, but it still doesn't translate to bankable. There is no answer to any question other than "what star originated roles in shows that add up to the most aggregate revenue?" One example: someone who is basically unknown who serendipitously finds him or herself repeatedly in shows with big stars who are the "draw" and that subsequently, through great marketing and casting manages to run forever. This could be Kaye in Phantom or Buckley in Cats historically, or it could be Barton in Comet now, whose presence would never have kept the show open for a day without the combination of Groban and the spectacle. You might use "what stars would do best if they invested in every show in which they are in the original cast?"

I don't have a problem with the inclusion of this stat (truly fwiw) but by putting it front and center and labeling it as you do it made my first reaction to the site that it was BS, something that I found it not to be when I started to dig. (But as you no doubt know, on the internet especially, most people don't get beyond first impressions.) And it doesn't help that very few if any of the people listed as bankable would be deemed bankable by anyone who is engaged in actually using data to make real world decisions. Some of them, in fact, are preposterous, and as every scientist knows, when the data isn't telling you something believable, you go back to find out why. 

Once again, none of this carping takes away from your very fine overall work.

 

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.

If you really want to measure bankability, I'd suggest restricting yourself to above-the-title credits and restricting yourself tp the time they were in the show.

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.

 

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.

I was wondering where James Monroe Iglehart would rank? He's been in a million dollar show for 4 years and he's in a bigger blockbuster now. Wouldn't making 309 million or more with 2 shows technically make you more bankable than making 350 million over 10 shows?

Updated On: 6/27/17 at 01:11 AM