Broadway Show Ticket Sales Analysis w/e 1/18/2015

"Motown" Rises To The Occasion Of Its Final Week

In the week ending January 18, 2015, Motown was one of the highest-grossing Broadway shows, beat only by the regular top earners The Lion King, Wicked, The Book of Mormon, and Aladdin. It brought in $1,299,340, which was an increase of $213,298 from the previous week.

The reason behind this upswing is that Motown played the final performance of its present run on that date: January 18, 2015. After a financially and critically successful run of 738 performances (and 37 preview performances), Motown the Musical decided to shutter its doors.

Unusual Hiatus For "Motown"

However, in an unusual move, the producers announced that this closing would not be permanent and that the show would take an 18-month hiatus and return in July 2016. In the meantime, a run will open in London, for which they will use the Broadway costumes and sets, thus saving some money.

Also, a U.S. national tour which began in April 2014 is still running. Thus, Motown is not saying goodbye for long; it’s just using some innovative reasoning to take a break from Broadway. Nevertheless, in this past week, it demonstrated that fans still love the show, as the show managed its highest weekly gross in over a year, and the last month of performances have all been financially healthy as well.

Productions Showing A Drop In Sales

This past week, The Elephant Man starring Bradley Cooper, which has been performing very well at the box office, saw a decrease in box office of $315,940, bringing in only $678,450. However, this decrease was due merely to the fact that the production played only 5 performances this past week, likely due to actor conflicts.

In that light, the show still made 111.75% of its gross potential, and it’s therefore still doing very well. For the most part, the other shows that demonstrated a decrease in ticket sales from the week prior are the top-earning musicals that could afford a decline. After The Elephant Man, the biggest decrease was seen by The Lion King, which went down by $118,853.

Big Decreases For "Mama Mia!" And "Phantom Of The Opera"

Still, in the scheme of things, this is not a big drop, as the mega-musical still brought in a weekly gross of $1,721,611, which was the top earning show this past week.

Next, decreases were seen by Mamma Mia! (went down by $74,423 to a gross of $476,709), The Phantom of the Opera (went down by $66,507 to a gross of $747,735), Chicago (went down by $43,494 to a gross of $437,317), Jersey Boys (went down by $41,140 to a gross of $742,891), Les Misérables (went down by $35,041 to a gross of $724,649), and Beautiful (went down by $9,734 to a gross of $1,062,857). For the most part, these shows could handle the minor losses, and they are all still holding up on Broadway.

The following are the Broadway ticket sales numbers for the week ending January 18, 2015:

Broadway ticket sales raw data are provided courtesy of The Broadway League All other data, text, opinion, charts and commentary are copyright © 2015 nytix.com