The 2024-2025 Broadway season just raked in a record-breaking $1,892,650,959 in grosses.  We finally exceeded the last complete Broadway season prior to the pandemic.  

It’s a big deal.  We should jump up and down and celebrate.

But this year was a little different than all others . . . can you guess?  I’ll give you a hint:

Othello, Goodnight and Good Luck, and Glengarry Glen Ross. 

Those three plays broke crazy records on Broadway as some of the highest-grossing plays of all time – and they were in the same dang season.  George Clooney in Goodnight grossed over $4mm multiple times (rivaling Lion King’s top numbers), Othello with Denzel & Jake grossed over $3mm for several weeks . . . in a 1,000-seat theater!  And Glengarry with Odenkirk and Kulkin and more were grossing in the mid-$2mms.  

With those numbers, I couldn’t help but wonder . . . what if those plays and those mega stars were NOT on Broadway this season?  Would we have had the highest grossing season ever?

So, I crunched some numbers. 

If we hypothetically removed those three shows from the yearly Broadway tally, Broadway’s total gross would have dropped to $1.789 billion.

The 2018-19 season grossed $1.829 billion.

We wouldn’t have made it.

But that’s not a fair comparison.  Because those three theaters would have been filled, most likely. 

So what I did next was imagine those same three spots and weeks held by Othello, Goodnight and Good Luck and Glengarry Glen Ross were filled with shows (plays or musicals) that averaged $1mm a week.

If you added that back in, you’d get a season gross of $1.827 billion.  Just shy of the record.

What’s the takeaway?

Broadway owes a huge debt of gratitude to those stars for spending these weeks with us and getting a whole bunch of people to sit in our theaters.  (I heard a rumor that at one point, up to 50% of the audience at The Clooney Show were “new to file” – which means they hadn’t seen a Broadway show before/weren’t in the ticketing database).

And we’ve still got a ways to go.  As I wrote about in this article, it’s exciting to be back to where we were before . . . but with expenses what they are, we need to be doing a billion dollars better.  

Now – do you think we’ll do $2 billion dollars next year???