DEATH BECOMES HER Is Closing- So What Happened?
Death Becomes Her’s first year averaged well over $1 million per week, but since then, they have averaged less than $750,000 a week at the box office.
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Death Becomes Her announced today they will be closing on Broadway on June 28 due to poor sales. This announcement comes as a relative surprise; had you asked anyone six months ago, they would have told you Death Becomes Her was more likely than not to have an extended run on Broadway.
Death Becomes Her opened in November 2024 to rave reviews, it’s campy madcap humor resonating with audiences and critics alike. Stellar grosses followed, from when it began performing full weeks during its preview period week ending 11/17/2024 through January of this year, every single week the show had grossed over $1 million at the box office, a rare feat, especially for a new musical. Now, five months later, they have become among the lowest selling shows on Broadway, frequently in the bottom five of all shows in average capacity and ticket price, a nearly unprecedented drop off.
Some of what makes this shocking is Death Becomes Her had shown growth at the box office all throughout last year, in a manner rarely seen on Broadway. The show enjoyed viral moment after viral moment, with songs like “Tell Me, Ernest”, and “Hit Me” garnering million of views and shares on social media. Q1 2025 grosses averaged just shy of $1.2 million, Q2 was about $100k a week higher, Q3 ticked up over $1.3 million per week, and Q4 was closer to $1.4 million per week at the box office. They are the only non-jukebox musical in the past few years that can boast a first four quarters as strong as this, with this kind of growth.
But Q1 2026? $1 million per week flat. And since the start of Q2 they have not grossed over $1 million in any given week, which had already put into question the long-term sustainability of the show prior to the closing announcement.
Some drop-off is to be expected in the show’s second year. Shows like The Outsiders, The Great Gatsby, and MJ all showed decreases in their second year of over one hundred thousand dollars per week, on average. But Death Becomes Her has comparatively fallen apart, dropping closer to $400k per week on average, compared to their first year. Other shows with fall offs that steep, like Hell’s Kitchen, for example, which dropped close to $600k per week in their second year, had not had the growth cycle throughout the year that Death Becomes Her had enjoyed.
But the real question is, what caused this shift?
Certainly, there are indications that tourism is slowing down. Take The Lion King, after posting a gross figure in excess of $1.5 million every week in the 24-25 Broadway season, this season they have had several weeks below that, including some of their lowest weeks since Broadway’s return from the pandemic five years ago. Even Wicked has become skittish enough with their comparatively low grosses to other years that they have instituted a student rush program, a rarity among shows of such popularity. Broadway as a whole over the last month or so has been significantly below the highs of last spring. Last summer was already lower than average for Broadway, and this summer is poised to potentially be even worse, as domestic and international tourists alike tighten purse strings as car and jet fuel prices soar. Domestic and international tourists make up nearly 2/3 of the Broadway musical-going audience, and in many ways they are the backbone of the industry in the current setup. Significant decrease there will be felt across the industry, without a doubt.
There is also the fact that Death Becomes Her recast 2025 Tony Nominee Megan Hilty in January, bringing in broadway veteran Betsy Wolfe to replace her, and leaving the rest of the principal cast intact. This is a relatively uncommon approach to recasting principal roles in the past few years, particularly ones who appear above the title. Though it is becoming more common, Chess and Maybe Happy Ending both decided for their first principal recasting that they would recast one of their leads and leave the rest in their roles. While Chess has yet to feel those impacts (you still have a month to catch Lea Michele as Florence Vassey before Jojo Levesque takes over the role), Maybe Happy Ending saw an immediate impact, with grosses dropping significantly after Darren Criss departed, though that recasting was met with additional criticisms.
Broadway is sustained in large part by the ultra-frequent theatregoers. 4% of theatre goers made up nearly 25% of total ticket sales in the 24-25 season, a figure that has increased over the past few years. It’s reasonable to infer that many of those people are returning to see the same show multiple times.
Take a show like Operation Mincemeat. Even prior to their Broadway stop, they had cultivated a base of die-hard fans, dubbed “mincefluencers”, from their acclaimed West End production, a pattern they were able to repeat on Broadway. Even a New York Times article was written about the show, with the author discussing that they were so enamored by this show that they had seen it a whopping 13 times in one year. It could have been difficult to sustain that magic when the cast of the show turned over. But Operation Mincemeat turned their recasting into a guessing game on their social media, building it into an event. They built hype for the new cast, and maybe most importantly, changed out the entire principal cast in one fell swoop. And comparing grosses between the casts, over the same stretch of dates in 2025 and 2026, each cast has put up practically identical box office numbers thus far.
Even without the social media hype that Mincemeat built for their changeover, other shows have done this to great effect. Hadestown and Wicked are maybe the most prominent, changing out almost the entire principal cast every 6 or 12 months, but other long running shows do this too, like Six. This keeps die hard fans coming back, over and over and over again, to see the new casts. And bringing in new talent, particularly if they are Broadway veterans, is a way to get different audiences in the doors.
But the most powerful ticket buying engine on Broadway is personal recommendations, or “word of mouth”. 30% of all purchasing decisions for Broadway musicals last year was due to personal recommendation, more than all traditional advertisement combined. When a cast changes over, it instantly becomes comparative between the departing cast members and the new cast members. Inserting one new cast member into a cast of pre-existing principal cast members could very well affect chemistry, and when a show relies heavily on that chemistry, like Wicked or Death Becomes Her, that could absolutely influence word of mouth, and positively, or negatively, affect ticket sales. It seems that may well have happened here.
Death Becomes Her’s closing announcement reflects less on Broadway’s utter inability to control costs- high as they undoubtedly are given the size of the show, but rather reflects on a show that failed to retain its existing audience, or find new ones.
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