Broadway had quite the year in 2018—the industry saw its highest grossing and most attended calendar year with a $1.825 billion in grosses.
According to Deadline, the boost is thanks to newcomers To Kill A Mockingbird and Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, as well as classic favorites like Chicago, The Lion King and Wicked breaking year-end weekly box office records. Altogether, productions brought in 14.37 million people during the year, beating 2017's 13.74 million.
The end of the year saw a spike in attendance; the week ending Dec. 30 saw 378,910 attendees, roughly 23 percent more than the week before. All 39 productions grossed a total of $57,807,272, 41 percent more than the previous week. (Deadline notes that a discrepancy in percentages is due to a rise in ticket price.)
Many productions broke records that busy holiday week, most of them house records, including Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, which broke the Broadway record for weekly ticket grosses for a play.
To Kill A Mocking Bird earned $1,701,684, breaking a record for an American play, while Hamilton became the first Broadway production to make the $4 million mark with its $4,041,493 grosses.
The last few years have seen a continuous rise in grosses: 2017 brought in 1.637 billion, 2016 $1.367 billion and 2015 $1.354 billion.
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