BROADWAY STAGES A MUSICAL COMEBACK
ATG has a starring role.
The number of new Broadway musicals is rebounding, after a lull last season. The growing roster includes acclaimed West End imports, new shows with songs by Prince and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and daunting $30 million budgets.
ATG Entertainment is central to the comeback. The multinational theater landlord and producer is raising $15 million to transfer The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to Broadway in the spring, after its Olivier Award-winning London engagement, according to investment documents obtained by Broadway Journal. Yesterday, Ari Emanuel’s live events company Mari said it signed a deal to buy ATG.
Benjamin Button will kick off its U.S. stand at the Public Theater this fall. Producers Gavin Kalin and GBA are also involved. The Celtic and folk music-infused show would join The Heart, which features electronic dance music and aims to transfer for about $15 million after a run at the Roundabout Theatre Co.’s off-Broadway venue, the Laura Pels.
Already announced for Broadway are Paddington ($31 million), Purple Rain ($29.5 million), The Dolly Parton musical Dolly ($30 million), Galileo ($23 million), Wanted, and Miranda and Eisa Davis’ The Warriors. (Wanted and Warriors haven’t disclosed their capitalizations in Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The figures for Dolly and Purple Rain include the cost of their out-of-town tryouts.)
If all eight shows arrive by the Tony Award cutoff in spring 2027, the number of new Broadway musicals in 2026-27 would normalize by 21st-century standards. They’d match or surpass those of 2011-12, 2012-13, 2017-18 and the abbreviated 2019-20 season. And that’s without The Lunchbox, Iceboy!, and Black Swan, which recently drew promising reviews in Berkeley, Chicago and Boston, respectively, among other musicals in the mix.
In 2025-26, six new musicals opened on Broadway — the fewest in a quarter century — reinforcing pessimism about the sustainability of the art form amid rising production costs and failure rates.
Investors are betting that Paddington can overcome the funk. By virtue of the rave reviews, strong sales in London and seven Olivier Awards, Dramatic Paws on Broadway LP, which is financing the iconic British bear’s Broadway debut, is oversubscribed.
The company producing Paddington, Sonia Friedman Productions, is an ATG subsidiary. And ATG owns the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, where the musical is scheduled to begin previews on March 30, 2027. Since 2013, ATG itself has been majority-owned by the private equity giant Providence Equity Partners, which signed the deal to sell to Emanuel’s Mari for a reported $6 billion.
Purple Rain backers can find encouragement in MJ, which recouped on Broadway 15 months after opening and has been highly profitable in New York and on tour. As several long-running musicals suffer losses, MJ’s grosses have been on the rise since May, buoyed by the popularity of the Michael Jackson biopic Michael.
To be sure, MJ was capitalized at $22.5 million in 2022, or about $26 million in today’s dollars. There’s no getting around the challenging math of a $30 million musical, which is usually accompanied by weekly operating expenses above $1 million.
Capitalized at $35.5 million in 2018, Harry Potter & the Cursed Child — a play budgeted like a musical — has recouped its investment and paid out a modest profit to date.
The experience of Death Becomes Her, which closed in June, is more discouraging. Capitalized at $31.5 million, Universal Theatrical Group’s adaptation of the 1992 dark comedy ran 666 regular performances and resulted in a total loss to investors as of early February 2026, according to a financial statement filed with the AG’s office.
A common complaint is that Broadway ticket prices are too high. But for many new shows that fail to sustain a run, the average ticket price isn’t high enough. The challenge for any production — costing $31 million or $15 million — is to generate the FOMO to entice a critical mass of theatergoers to pay top dollar, week after week.
That concept of tiered pricing is familiar to Emanuel, who’s assembled tennis tournaments, art fairs, sports hospitality and other premium live event companies. “Rich people are asking for more and more, ‘cause they can get everything,” Emanuel recently told podcaster Patrick O’Shaughnessy. “Some people are going to pay $100. Some people are going to pay $300. And then some people are going to pay crazy.”
Broadway’s rebound in new musicals hinges on whether enough people will pay crazy to see them.