How much money do West End shows make?

Given how obsessed the film industry is with reporting on box office grosses and financial achievements (thanks, recently, to James Cameron and a group of blue CGI aliens), it’s surprising how opaque the theatre eco-system can be when it comes to discussing money. 

While many headlines suggest shows “break box office records”, the ability to delve into the minutuae of a production’s success is hard to come by for the standard layperson like you or I. 

The situation is remarkably different over on Broadway, where umbrella organisation the Broadway League print the weekly grosses for all productions that are running. This has since become a heavily relied-upon pulse check for the New York stage eco-system – a means of discovering who is seeing what, where the hottest tickets are and which shows might be a few weeks from closure. 

Given the circumstances, it almost becomes more intriguing when West End producers do stick their heads above the parapet – as was done recently by Shirley Valentine‘s David Pugh, who tweeted the following about the opening of the Sheridan Smith-led solo show earlier yesterday: “Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine starring Sheridan Smith has just broken the box office record at the Duke of Yorks Theatre opening tonight to a box office advance of over four million pounds.” 

[For those who need to know, a box office advance is the total amount made before the show has had its officially opened.]

Now – that sounds like a very significant amount of money – but how does it compare to other shows? 

The funny thing is – we can’t really tell you. The Society of London London Theatre (SOLT) releases annual box office stats, with 2022 seeing total box office revenue for the West End set at £892,896,521 across 19,224 performances. 

Now, for the sake of a thought experiment, we are going to ignore the fact that the West End has wildly different venue sizes and ticket prices for shows. Doing a little bit of maths, this would mean on average a show at a mean-capacity SOLT venue is making £46,445 per performance – or in an eight show week, £371,564. Smaller venues like the Duke of York’s, where Shirley Valentine, naturally have a more limited ability to make the same amount as something like Wicked or The Lion King. 

Sometimes productions like to throw around impressive figures in order to make headlines. If you wade through the annals of Google, back in 2013/14 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was said to be bringing in around £1,000,000 a week (deemed a record-breaking amount for the venue at the time), while 2013 reportedly saw the major revival of Miss Saigon make £4.4m in one day. In 2014, The Lion King was said to be taking around £30,000,000 a year – I can’t imagine that figure has gone down. On average, that’d be around £570,000 a week. 

How much profit is made is a whole other kettle of fish – especially with rising material prices, inflation and wages – a show’s running costs can vary significantly. 

If SOLT started instructing shows to report weekly grosses, things would be very different. But for now we must continue in a world of pure speculation.