Harry Potter, With Film Star Tom Felton, Sets New All-Run High, and More From Last Week’s Broadway Grosses

Grosses

Harry Potter, With Film Star Tom Felton, Sets New All-Run High, and More From Last Week’s Broadway Grosses

With Felton reprising his screen performance as Draco Malfoy in the stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child brought in nearly $3 million.

The butterbeer must be pouring generously over at Broadway’s Lyric Theatre, where Harry Potter and the Cursed Child enjoyed another gangbusters week at the box office. Tom Felton, Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter film franchise, is reprising his take on the character in the stage play, and clearly audiences are into it. Last week, the show brought in $2.97 million, the highest take in a single week for the Tony-winning play’s entire run, and a record setter for an eight-performance week at the Lyric. The week prior was already a record setter for a seven-performance week, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the show flew even higher with that additional showing.

Gross watchers will also be interested to see that The Queen of Versailles, which became the first new production to announce an abrupt final performance (set for the first Sunday after New Year’s), brought in a solid $877,244, filling 86% of its seats. What’s not in the grosses data is what the show costs to run, so we don’t know how much of that, if any, was profit. But it’s a surprising figure to see from a show that has freshly decided to close up shop. Unfortunately, this likely indicates either that this weekly take is not meeting their running costs, and-or that the closure decision hinged more strongly on the condition of advance sales.

Across Broadway, fortunes continued to rise as we approach the winter holidays that historically bring Broadway’s busiest and most profitable weeks. The 34 currently running shows brought in $40,638,869, up a point from the week prior. Houses were an average of 89% full, with theatregoers paying an average of $139.93 for their tickets, up by almost $5 from the previous week’s average.

The big winner was, once again, Hamilton, which is currently back on top with a returning cast member of its own, Tony winner Leslie Odom, Jr. as Aaron Burr. The encore run has reinvigorated the Tony-winning musical, which has sat comfortably as Broadway’s top grosser for weeks now. But all good things must come to an end. Odom is scheduled to take his final bow November 26, which will probably bring ticket prices closer to earth (the average ticket price last week was a jaw-dropping $342.96, and topped out at $1,500). The rest of the top five spots belonged to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Wicked, Chess, and The Lion King.

Speaking of which, Chess, back on Broadway for its first-ever revival with Aaron Tveit, Lea Michele, and Nicholas Christopher starring, is proving itself a consistent hit. The show had four heavily comped performances last week, and still cleared The $2 Million Club, ranking as the fourth highest-grossing on the boards. It’s looking like, so far, it’s the best performing of the season’s new crop of shows, alongside fellow winners Mamma Mia!, Art, Waiting for Godot, and Ragtime.