Whipped Cream Difficulties

Sixty million dollars. At least, that’s the estimate according to the NYT:

Investors and executives with the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” said on Tuesday that the show will have historic losses of up to $60 million when it closes on Jan. 4. The closing follows a sharp decline in ticket sales because of competition from hotter musicals and a lack of star attractions in the cast.

More:

Several investors said they were reeling from the closing announcement, made on Monday night. Three said they have not been paid back anything during the three-year run of “Spider-Man,” which cost twice as much as any other Broadway show, and said they planned to write off their investments. While Broadway flops usually lose $5 million to $15 million, “Spider-Man” will lose far more, given the show’s record-setting $75 million capitalization; the enormous weekly costs of running this special effects-laden production; and its operating losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars a week this fall, as the box office faltered.

And:

“We will see nothing back, not a cent,” said Terry Allen Kramer, a veteran Broadway producer who put about $1 million into “Spider-Man.” “A lot of us feel that it’s an extraordinary show with lousy music, but the main problem is that the budget numbers were a disaster — just a disaster.”

“an extraordinary show with lousy music”. I love that quote.

As the paper of record notes, the show cost somewhere between $1 million and $1.3 million a week to run; weekly grosses went below $1 million in August.

By the end of September, the musical was heavily discounting tickets and its weekly gross had fallen to $621,960.

Plus:

And the show was also saddled with payments on multimillion-dollar priority loans from a crucial investor, Norton Herrick, and from the show’s lead producers, Michael Cohl and Jeremiah J. Harris. (Priority loans made by lead producers and others, and repayment schedules that favor them over regular investors, are standard on Broadway shows that need quick capital to deal with cost overruns.)

That’s…interesting. The producers got their loans repaid up front, and the regular investors will apparently get…nothing. (According to the NYT, those priority loans were at least partially repaid.)

Also: Gene Simmons is the Green Goblin!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 20th, 2013 at 6:37 am and is filed under Clippings, Schadenfreude, Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.