Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the highest-grossing Broadway play ever
By Dan Selcke
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a play in two parts, a staged follow-up to J.K. Rowling’s monumentally successful Harry Potter novels. The play, written by Rowling herself, follows Harry and his family 19 years after the conclusion of her books. It opened in London back in 2016 where it found phenomenal success, selling 175,000 tickets in the first eight hours of booking. Then, in March of this year, the play opened at the Lyric Theater on Broadway in New York City, where it’s also been a monster-sized hit. In fact, the Evening Standard reports that it’s pulled in $78 million and selling tickets at a rate of about $2 million a week, which makes it the highest-grossing Broadway play in history.
There are a couple caveats here. First, Cursed Child is the highest-grossing Broadway play, not the highest-grossing show. There are Broadway musicals that have run for decades — Phantom of the Opera has been running since 1988, for heaven’s sake — so it’s not really fare to compare that to a play that opened nine months ago. We’ll see where Cursed Child is in 30 years.
Second, compared to what something like what the Harry Potter movies made at the box office, $78 million isn’t anything to write home about. But again, Broadway plays the long game. And with this kind of success, it can’t be that long before we see Cursed Child on the big screen in some form. Most of the principal cast members have stuck with the show since it opened on the West End and migrated to New York; it’d be nice if they got a chance to show off what they can do on the big screen.
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The success of Cursed Child is somewhat at odds with the initial response to the play among Harry Potter fans, many of whom lambasted it for its characterization and for playing fast and loose with the rules of the Wizarding World. In a way, that response foreshadowed the the current public relations problems J.K. Rowling is having now, with some taking aim at her for controversial choices she made while writing the Fantastic Beasts movies.
But the general theater-going public clearly doesn’t share their concerns, nor do the critics. In addition to cleaning up at the box office, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child has more Olivier Awards than any play in history, and is nominated for six Tonys. It’ll be just fine.
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