New York Gave These Broadway Shows Millions — And They Flopped Anyway
Posted: 3/20/26 at 12:43pm
It always helps when the show isn't absolutely horrible.
Posted: 3/20/26 at 1:28pm
When a show is terrible and/or audiences aren’t interested enough to buy tickets, no amount of money guarantees a successful show. Global socialite Bunny Meyers could invest $350M in a show and that means zero to audiences.
Posted: 3/20/26 at 1:36pm
I mean. What do they expect to do? Have New York State reps come to backers auditions and determine if they want to provide the funding or not? More arts funding is always good.
Updated On: 3/20/26 at 01:36 PM
Posted: 3/20/26 at 1:48pm
I hate when articles say things like "but revenue this year is up more than ever". Well sure if you are talking about GROSS revenue, which they are. But the cost of mounting shows has drastically increased. We have more shows than ever in the "million dollar club" of grosses each week. But that doesn't mean anything these days, when big musicals have weekly break-evens of $900 to 1.1 million. If your gross is $1.3 million but you have only put about $200k toward recouping...does it matter that the gross today is higher than what it would have been in 2019? Using "revenue is up!" as an excuse to cut the program is an incredibly surface level take meant to paint industry members as greedy mooches. In the era of $25 million+ musicals, I'm perfectly fine with the tax program continuing to help an industry that supports so many New York jobs and related businesses.
Posted: 3/20/26 at 2:08pm
I can't believe the government wasted money funding Lempicka! Anyways, back to spending $2 billion per day on the child porn distraction war.
edit: to put that into perspective, that's more than one Lempicka credit ($2.6 million) every two minutes
Updated On: 3/20/26 at 02:08 PM
Posted: 3/20/26 at 2:35pm
There are countless tax breaks and credits for things that are money-losers. Reducing everything to a monetary value reduces the value of everything.
Posted: 3/21/26 at 11:37am
More funding to the arts is never going to be a bad thing, but the article brought up a good point: why are Lion King and Aladdin, two shows produced by the most lucrative and powerful entertainment company on the planet, getting the full $3 million credit?
Posted: 3/21/26 at 12:09pm
It might have also been helpful if the tax credit was spread out over time a bit more - like a cap on the number of productions getting one each fiscal year.
A not so negligible part of why so many shows tanked is that there was a race to claim the credit before it ran out and so you got many shows coming in that were underdeveloped and creating a pile-up that offered too many choices to a slow market. I doubt many of the shows under the credit would still be running today, but there is still the chance they might have gotten more mileage if they all didn’t compete at once.
Posted: 3/23/26 at 8:55am
It’s a decent article. It doesn’t go into the fact that the tax credit also goes to a number of Off Broadway productions. But the basic point that a tax credit created as triage during the pandemic should at least be amended post-pandemic. The city continuing to throw millions at Cursed Child and Lion King feels wrong.
Updated On: 3/23/26 at 08:55 AM
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