How long does a Broadway show actually run?
How long does a Broadway show run?
The median Broadway production that opened since 2010 and has now closed ran 87 days — under three months from opening night to closing night. 54% close inside their first three months, and only 11% reach a first anniversary. The long-running hits that define Broadway in the public imagination are statistical outliers.
Ask someone how long a Broadway show runs and they will picture The Lion King, or Chicago, or Wicked — productions measured in decades. That picture is built from the handful of shows that survive long enough to become landmarks, and it is almost exactly backwards.
What is the typical Broadway run?
87 days. That is the median across every Broadway production in our catalog that opened on or after 2010 and has since closed — about 2.9 months from opening night to the final performance.
Half of all productions run shorter than that. The middle half of the distribution sits between 52 and 136 days, which means the ordinary outcome for a Broadway show is a run measured in months.
How many shows actually become hits?
Only 60 productions in the set — 11% — reached a first anniversary. The longest completed run in the period belongs to Moulin Rouge! The Musical , at 7.1 years.
That gap between the median and the maximum is the whole shape of the business. A tiny number of productions run long enough to return their capital several times over, and they subsidise the attention paid to an industry where the typical result is a few months and a closing notice.
Do revivals last longer than new shows?
No, and this is the finding we least expected.
Revivals carry a title the audience already knows, which is usually described as the safer commercial bet. In the data they are not: revivals ran a median of 87 days against 84 days for everything else, across 189 revivals and 371 other productions.
Whatever recognition buys a revival, it does not buy length of run.
Why measure days instead of performances?
Broadway convention counts performances, and a long run is usually quoted that way. We count calendar days between opening night and closing night, for one reason: the catalog records dates, not performance counts. Converting days into performances would mean assuming an unvarying eight-show week — through holiday weeks, cancelled performances, and the weeks when a production adds a ninth — and reporting a number the underlying data does not contain.
Days are what we can actually verify, so days are what we publish.
What the data shows
- The median Broadway run since 2010 is 87 days — about 2.9 months from opening night to closing night.
- 54% of Broadway productions (300 of 560) close within three months of opening.
- Only 11% of productions (60) reach a first anniversary.
- Revivals and new productions are indistinguishable: a median of 87 days for revivals against 84 days for everything else.
- The middle half of all runs falls between 52 and 136 days — a spread of a few months, not a few years.
| Run length | Productions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1 month | 54 | 10% |
| 1 to 3 months | 246 | 44% |
| 3 to 6 months | 154 | 28% |
| 6 to 12 months | 46 | 8% |
| 1 to 3 years | 51 | 9% |
| Over 3 years | 9 | 2% |
Methodology
Computed from 560 of 638 productions (88% coverage), as of .
Broadway productions that opened on or after 1 January 2010 and had closed by 2026-09-18. Excludes productions still running, productions with an announced but not yet reached closing date, and any production missing an opening or closing date. Length is calendar days from opening night to closing night, not number of performances — the catalog does not record performance counts.
Sources
- The Broadway League — production database and grosses The Broadway League Accessed
- Theatreview production catalog Theatreview Accessed
