People love to declare Broadway "dying" or "booming," usually with zero numbers attached. The truth is you don't have to guess — the industry publishes its own scoreboard every Monday, and it tells you exactly how the previous week went. The live snapshot above is pulled straight from the latest figures; here's how to make sense of it.
The three vital signs
- Total weekly gross — every running show's box office added together. In a healthy, ordinary week, all of Broadway combined pulls in somewhere around $30,000,000.00 to $38,000,000.00. Holiday weeks rocket past $50,000,000.00; the deep-winter January lull can sag toward $25,000,000.00.
- Average capacity ("how full") — the share of all seats that sold. Broadway-wide, the 80s percent is a comfortable, healthy number; the 90s means the town is hot.
- Week-over-week change — the direction of travel. A single week is noisy (one holiday or blizzard can swing it), so the trend over a month tells you far more than any one number.
Context is everything
A dip isn't automatically bad news. Broadway breathes with the calendar — a soft January is completely normal, and a giant December is expected. The real question is always "compared to when?" To judge a week fairly, line it up against the same week last year, not the week before. You can do exactly that by scrolling our Weekly Grosses archive, which goes back years.
Want the story, not just the stats?
Numbers are the skeleton; the interesting part is what's moving them. Every week we translate the new figures into plain English — the records, the biggest gainers and faders, and the weather or events behind them — in the Broadway Briefing on our homepage. For the deeper patterns (how holidays, weather, and genre move the numbers), head to Broadway Trends.