Broadway Grosses: Week Ending 10/16/22 — Page 2

The reality is that TONY awards and TONY nominations don’t turn actors into bankable “names.”

Or rather, there’s a pivotal difference between a Broadway “name” and a TV/movie/music name, where the box office is concerned (and this is a thread about the box office).

This has been demonstrated consistently, time and time again. Broadway names don’t hurt, but they don’t sell enough tickets to make or break their recoupment because their sphere of “fame” is too niche and insular. And even having a successful TV/film/music career doesn’t guarantee butts in seats, as other recent/current examples have shown.

So yes, it is very impressive that Into the Woods is continuing to rack up $1.2MM grosses without any names.

RE: ITW It is impressive and agree that the 'names' in the show don't mean anything right now, and also the sales right now definitely reflect new and last-minute sales (as opposed to a strong advance from when the show had a lot of buzz) based on my observations of the seating charts from weeks ago.

My two comments are that one, it's clear how much of a relative barn the St James is that the show can still bring in the $$$ despite the amount of empty seats (though this can't help the feeling of buzz inside the theatre), and two, they still don't seem to have a healthy advance. If the show can keep this momentum through short-term ticket sales until closing I think it demonstrates the power of the brand of the show + word of mouth + power of last-minute ticket sales. If they can bring back Sara for the final few weeks even better. I would not say they are 'out of the woods'.

Updated On: 10/19/22 at 05:49 AM

I wonder if ITW is still thinking of transferring theaters for the Spring?

Of all shows on Broadway, ITW has had by far the shortest # of weeks to build an advance. Even shows just starting previews have been selling tickets much earlier than ITW most recent extension.

Even more important is that even with a small window of time to build an advance, it had the 8th highest average ticket price of the 27 running shows, and was just a couple thousand less than the next 3 show averages.

To be hovering around the top 5 for average ticket price with such a tiny time to build an advance speaks to a demand that isn’t yet being seen in its total capacity numbers.

There is definitely strong word of mouth that hasn’t disappeared with the new cast. If it’s doing $1.2 million during a blah week, what will it be doing with some of the strongest weeks of the year coming up and time to sell advance tickets?

I assume it will do $2 million at 100% capacity by Thanksgiving week. The producers have to be betting on an extension. If tickets for the first 6 months of 2023 become available by the middle of November, the holidays create the perfect opportunity to build the advance for the new year.

Shows without a headliner star don’t close with weekly grosses at ITW current level.

And remember, a couple of high profile closures in January create an opportunity for already popular shows to build audiences.

TotallyEffed said: "The grosses for Leopoldstadt are particularly encouraging given all the antisemitismin the headlines this month."

Omayn.

Meanwhile, aren't these numbers that LEOPOLDSTADT is putting up a house record for the Longacre? Since the point in time that shows started grossing over $1M I cannot think of a tenant at the Longacre that could have posted a figure like that. i.e. not THE PROM, DIANA, ALLEGIANCE, BRONX TALE, CHINGLISH etc. Did the revival of The Scottish Play with Daniel Craig do business like this? That's the only one I can think of that might have approached these figures.

Thanks, JBroadway. I did attempt to research it on this forum but to no avail. All the old posts kept on linking to the current week's grosses. I did not know that grosses were archived elsewhere. Thanks again.

AEA AGMA SM said: "For future reference, on the Grosses page there are several options to see historical gross data near the top of the page (next to the line chart on my screen, using Safari on MacOS). There is a "Grosses by Show" option which will bring up all of the shows that have data available, or a "Grosses by Theatre" option, which will narrow the list down to just the shows that have played in the theatre."



Thank you! I'm acutely embarrassed that I never saw those links before. Really happy to have them pointed out to me.

Didn’t most of us expect Kite Runner to be closed by now after the reviews came in when it opened?