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Thursday, January 30, 2014
The Cost of a Musical on Broadway Infographic
Infographics Showcase: This infographic was able to bring the feel of theater into a single design.The colors used in the Wicked section were a perfect choice that fit well with the subject. The charts that were used to show the costs of the show were ones that have already been done. It would have been nice to see something a little more creative to show these costs especially when discussing such a creative topic.
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4 comments:
There is a lot of interesting information in this infographic that I didn't know before. I knew that the budgets for Broadway shows were crazy high but I never really thought about how that breaks down and how long it takes to break even. I was pretty surprised by the breakdown for Wicked and that more than a third of the budget goes toward marketing, insurance, and transportation and not toward build cost or labor. I was also surprised that it took Wicked 14 months to break even but that means they were making $1 million in profit a month which is pretty impressive. But the Broadway figures are dwarfed by Cirque's Ka in Vegas; more than half a billion dollars to produce and yet they still end up turning a profit. The fact that all the Cirque shows at least break even while only 1 out of 10 Broadway shows do speaks to the differences between theatre and spectacles like Cirque and venues like Las Vegas. Even though this infographic puts them together they really aren't comparable.
I thought that this infographic was really cool, and the information in it was interesting. I liked to see how they broke down the budget for Wicked, and it was also interesting to see how much the leads in that show made. I know that some shows don't make it on Broadway, but I was surprised to see how many shows didn't profit. On a similar note, it was cool to see that every Cirque show profits, even with sets that cost over 300 million dollars. I liked how they put in the London West End, and it was cool to see how the budgets compare to Broadway. I agree with what Philip said about Broadway and Cirque not being comparable, and in someways that infographic could have been just comparing theatre on Broadway and in the West End. The Cirque stuff was really interesting, and it gave a cool perspective, but it was also a bit out of place.
Wow, talk about a lot of interesting information. For one, I certainly didn't realize that the "failure rate" for profitable shows on broadway was so high. Furthermore, I find it interesting that the budget for publicity and marketing is the largest portion. I suppose it does make sense that getting the word out about a show is the most expensive part..
This may be my personal favorite article on the green page in the last year and a half. I am someone who really likes statistics and numbers and graphs. For me Broadway has always been a little mysterious because the scale is so very large. After reading though this image I feel like I understand how things work and what the scale of shows is in a much deeper way. I thought that the comparisons that this graphic show between different types of shows were really amazing. For example I thought that the amount of money spent of Cirque shows was much smaller than Broadway shows before I read this. I think I'm going to try to hunt down more of this type of data before I go out in to the "real world" so that I can have a better understanding of the money on the large scale, and how I fit in to it all. I would be interested to know who paid for this graphic to be made and why.
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