By Jennifer R Jones | Posted on October 11, 2017 3:04 PM
Springsteen Soared Onto Broadway With Sky-Shattering Grosses, And The Band’s Visit Is Also A Promising New Musical With Excellent Performance.
Ticket Sales Surge After A String Of Slow Weeks
This past week, the week ending October 8, 2017, the Broadway box office had an extraordinary week. Across the 29 shows currently running, which is five more than the week before, the collective box office was $30,239,540, which is an astounding increase of $7,033,216 more than last week.
The average gross per show this past week was $1,042,743, whereas last week’s per-show average was $966,930. With an average top ticket price of $314. 26, the average paid admission across all shows was $129.04, and the audience was filled up on average to a capacity of 91.04%.
Big Increases Across The Board
In contrast, last week’s average audience capacity across the board was 84.10%. Of the 29 shows running, all but 2 experienced an increase in ticket sales, and those two decreases were negligible. The biggest increase of a show that was running both this week and last week was seen by Wicked, which brought in $1,869,463, which is an increase of $450,398 from the week before.
In addition, The Lion King went up by $401,136 to reach a weekly gross of $2,277,458, and School of Rock went up by $360,804 to reach a weekly gross of $964,643. Furthermore, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory went up by $283,684 to reach a weekly gross of $842,320, Aladdin went up by $272,214 to reach a weekly gross of $1,580,366, 1984 went up by $188,390 to reach a weekly gross of $490,658, Kinky Boots went up by $178,850 to reach a weekly gross of $944,925, Cats went up by $170,192 to reach a weekly gross of $748,267, The Phantom of the Opera went up by $166,945 to reach a weekly gross of $1,098,807, Waitress went up by $165,437 to reach a weekly gross of $805,496, and Anastasia went up by $138,106 to reach a weekly gross of $961,099.
New Shows: Springsteen, “Junk,” “M. Butterfly,” And “The Band’s Visit”
This past week, four shows began previews, launching the show’s grosses significantly higher than the week before. In addition, War Paint restarted performances after a hiatus, adding another show to the charts this week that wasn’t there last week.
Of these, Springsteen on Broadway is the obvious frontrunner. This past week, over the five performances that will be standard throughout Springsteen’s run of his solo show on Broadway, the weekly gross was $2,332,108, which represents 98.5% of the show’s potential.
Hamilton Is Highest Grossing Show
With a top ticket price of $850, the average paid admission was $496.72, and the audience was filled up to 100.0%. That is hundreds of dollars over the average paid admission for the next highest grossing show, Hamilton, which had an average paid admission of $272.24 with a total weekly gross of $2,928,486. Interestingly, Hamilton was one of the two shows to show a negligible decrease this past week, going down by $13,181.
The other was Dear Evan Hansen, which went down by $5,621 to reach an also impressive weekly gross of $1,674,685, or 121.6% of its gross potential. As for the other shows that began performances this past week, Junk brought in $238,130 over 4 performances, which represents 46.5% of its gross potential. M. Butterfly brought in $199,627 over 2 performances, which represents 82.3% of its gross potential. Finally, The Band’s Visit brought in $134,679 over 1 performance, which represents 98.9% of its gross potential.
Auspicious Beginning For "The Band's Visit"
While this is an auspicious beginning for The Band’s Visit, one preview performance alone cannot be a true indicator of a show’s upcoming success. Nevertheless, this well-reviewed musical does have a lot of buzz surrounding it from its pre-Broadway run, and there is a chance that it may turn out to be one of the top musicals of the upcoming season.
