NYC Super Bowl Didn’t Translate to Sales for Broadway Shows

Originally, it was thought that a Super Bowl hosted in New York would translate into stronger sales for Broadway shows. However, it seems as though the Super Bowl hurt rather than helped Broadway tickets sales; sales that were already weakened by the annual January slowdown.

The Broadway box office dipped approximately 13%, or $2.4 million to $16.7 million for a total of 26 shows on the boards. Show attendance slipped to 183,092 which is down nearly 15,000 theatergoers. In comparison to the success of Broadway since spring 2013 due to a series of strong-selling musicals, the past week’s figures seem drastically poorer. Especially since these figures somewhat match those of last year at the same time when there were only 22 shows running and when there wasn’t a huge surge of people in the area for a major event.

However, some shows did come out unscathed by the Super Bowl. The ever popular The Book of Mormon was in the top 10 with $1, 641, 717 in sales ahead of Wicked with $1,403,247 in sales and The Lion King with $1,293,167 in sales. The only other show to play to full houses last week was Twelfth Night/Richard III which made $907,006 in sales, a new house record at the Belasco Theater.  After Midnight which saw sales of $584,044, also did pretty well posting a week-to-week gain likely spurred by last-minute sales from theatergoers wanting to catching topliner Fantasia Barrino before she turns over her guest-starring role to K.D. Lang next week.

Meanwhile, the majority of Broadway titles took a hit such as Motown which made $978,954 and Matilda which made $969,639; both falling below the million-dollar mark. Pippin which made $614,740 in sales also fell to its lowest tally since before the well-reviewed revival opened in April.

On the bright side, the traditionally low selling month of January is now giving way to Valentine’s Day which generally brings a spike in sales due to date night theatergoers.