Broadway’s fall has opened on a down note. For the week ending Sept. 27, the 26 shows running took in $24.1 million, a drop of 11% from the previous week and a striking 21.7% below the same week in 2025, when the street grossed $30.8 million. Attendance landed at 209,194, and houses filled to about 87% of capacity. The season is starting slower than anyone in the theater district wanted to see.
The average hides an uneven market. Hamilton led with $2.6 million, trailed by The Lion King, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, MJ, and Oh, Mary!, the Cole Escola comedy that has become the rare new play to sell like a musical. A short list of titles is thriving. The trouble sits in the middle of the chart, where the shows without a brand name or a marquee star are absorbing most of the decline.
Look closer and the bright spots are real. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child was up 96% against the same week last year, and Chicago, the revival that refuses to close, climbed 95%. Those are not rounding errors. They suggest the audience is still very much there for the right title, and that catalog properties with instant recognition are hoovering up demand that once spread more evenly across the board.
The weakness shows at the edges. Wicked shed nearly $300,000 week over week, and Stranger Things: The First Shadow fell about $249,000, the sort of slippage that arrives when the fall slate is thin and the tourists have not fully returned. Relief is close. School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play opened Sept. 28, and The Imaginary Invalid begins previews toward an October opening, so the calendar is about to get considerably busier.
One soft week is not a crisis, and measuring against a strong 2025 flatters the size of the drop. Even so, a 22% year-over-year gap is the kind of figure that makes producers uneasy heading into the stretch when the industry does its real business. Broadway’s health rests more and more on a short roster of megahits and revivable warhorses. The blockbusters are fine. The open question is whether a middle class of shows can still survive underneath them.
