Broadway Grosses Analysis: Lincoln Center Theater’s McNeal Joins The $1 Million Club
A.I.—and Robert Downey Jr.—are selling big at the Vivian Beaumont.
Graphic by Vi Dang
As predicted last week, McNeal handily joined The $1 Million Club in its first full week of performances. The Lincoln Center Theater production has some major star power, namely Oppenheimer Academy Award winner Robert Downey Jr. We can’t know whether audiences are responding to that or the Ayad Akhtar play’s incendiary topic—the use of A.I. to create art—but either way, the work is shaping up to be one of the top-grossing new productions of the season.
And it looks like plays are the, perhaps, unlikely success story of Broadway’s newest crop at the moment. McNeal was the sixth highest grosser of the week, just barely beating out fellow smash hit play Oh, Mary!, which broke its own box-office record at the Lyceum Theatre for the sixth time. The Cole Escola play just recently got a second extension that keeps it performing through the holiday season and into 2025, and it’s not hard to see why.
Both are capitalizing on their appeal with high ticket prices that are maximizing box-office returns. McNeal‘s average ticket price last week was $157, while Oh, Mary!‘s was $162 (the highest across all of Broadway)—the former still brought in more overall thanks to about 200 more seats at the Beaumont.
But don’t worry. Audiences still love musicals. As per usual, they dominated the complete top five highest grossers last week, with The Outsiders returning to that status after slipping the past few weeks. That Best Musical winner and Hell’s Kitchen seem to be just about neck-and-neck when it comes to box-office take, fighting each week for a spot at the top. This week both made the top five, with Outsiders just barely out-performing the Alicia Keys biomusical ($1.3 million compared to Hell’s Kitchen‘s $1.29 million).
Both shows probably ranked higher this week because the high-grossing Cabaret revival got two new stars last week—Adam Lambert and Auli’i Cravalho. The show has been getting press in on comped tickets to see the new duo, and that will continue this week and next, which may affect the revival’s standings for a couple more weeks.
The rest of the top five was taken up by usual suspects The Lion King, Wicked, and Hamilton. We’re still not seeing shows break past the $2 million mark, which is maybe not too surprising as tourism tends to slow in the first weeks of fall. Cumulatively across all 29 currently-running shows, Broadway brought in $25.3 million, down a little over 7% from the week previous, but still reflecting an increase of more than 7% compared to the season this far last year. As for the audience, 226,267 people saw a Broadway show last week, filling seats by almost 85%. That may mean the time is ripe for theatre fans who live in the area to catch a show before things get busier with the fall and winter holidays.
Take a look at the full report here.
The $1 Million Club (shows that earned $1 million or more at the box office):
(10 of 29 currently running productions)
The 90s Club (shows that played to 90% or higher of their seats filled over the entire week):
(11 of 29 currently running productions)