The Lion King , one of Broadway’s most reliable warhorses now in its 17th year, shocked the theater industry by topping the Broadway box office numbers for 2013, a rare feat for a long-running show. While of course most long-running shows are successful — otherwise they wouldn’t be long-running — it is unusual for a show that’s been around as long as The Lion King to show an actual surge in box-office revenues.
The Lion King had not topped the annual Broadway box office standings since 2003. The show opened on October 15, 1997. But according a New York Times analysis published Monday, the show’s producer, Disney, has employed a sophisticated computer algorithm that has not only allowed the show to rake in between $1.5 million and $2 million every week on average, it’s accomplishing this feat while keeping the show’s top ticket price much lower than the typical top price for a hit Broadway show.
The highest ticket price to see The Lion King stands at $227. Brodway’s other top grossers far exceed that mark. The Book of Mormon charges $477, Wicked has a top price of $300 and 2013 Tony Award winning Kinky Boots hits up customers for $323 on its choicest seats.
How does Disney do it? Like most Broadway shows, they employ a strategy known as “dynamic pricing.” In other words, they adjust ticket prices on the fly based on what they perceive as audience demand as determined by the day of the week, time of year and other factors.
But for The Lion King , Disney has taken the dynamic pricing technique into the 21st century, employing a sophisticated computer algorithm that crunches data from 11.5 million Lion King ticket buyers over the years, allowing Disney to tweak Lion King ticket prices with pinpoint accuracy.
The model allows Disney to extract the most possible cash from a Lion King ticket buyer for every seat sold, rather than let a seat go unsold due to overpricing, or discount tickets too steeply — a common Broadway practice.
For the week ending March 9 — the most recent week for which data has been posted — The Lion King took third place with a gross of $1,511,718. Book of Mormon at $1,583,887 and Wicked with $1,667,093 edged out Lion King .
The 1994 animated film of The Lion King , on which the Julie Taymor-directed Broadway show is based, was Disney’s highest grossing animated film in its history, until it was nipped by Frozen earlier this year.