New Website Reframes Broadway Box Office Grosses

While the Broadway box office grosses drive headlines, a new website shows that there is more to the story than the published figures suggest.

Named after the futuristic invention featured in the musical Sunday in the Park with George, chromolume.io synthesizes the gross weekly box office receipts of Broadway shows to create industry power rankings. Instead of “reading a chart that doesn’t always make a ton of sense,” founder Ido Gal explained that the website tries to provide context for the information and “make it digestible and easy to understand.”

Each week, the website calculates a composite score for every Broadway show based upon seven weighted factors, including the revenue generated from each available seat. Capturing multiple metrics in a single number like the passer rating in football, the financial performance of shows can now be more meaningfully compared to each other.

Without using a standardized metric, it would be misleading to simply contrast the $958,537 in ticket sales last week of the open-ended musical The Lost Boys at the 1,648-seat Palace Theatre to the $935,431 in ticket sales last week of limited engagement, star-driven revival of the play Proof at 800-seat Booth Theatre. Taking into account all of the different factors, chromolume.io ranks the latter show higher than the former show right now.

Even comparing the ticket sales of the same exact show across weeks could be misleading. For example, a decline in ticket sales could actually be due to a change in the number of performances or certain cast absences, as opposed to an actual decline in demand.

Decoding the Broadway grosses can also spotlight which shows deserve more attention.

For example, when Jonathan Groff starred in Just in Time, Gal felt that the show “did not get the credit that it deserved as a commercial asset.” “It is a very small house with an insane revenue per available seat, capacity above 100%, and, by my score, it was way outperforming Hamilton, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and The Lion King,” he said. Yet, many of the articles published about the Broadway box office each week barely mentioned it.

Gal, who also works as the data and marketing administrator at the theatrical production company Seaview, hopes to identify trends and offer insights that the Broadway grosses do not provide in a weekly newsletter. The first edition was sent to subscribers last week.