Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is the new king of the jungle…
The 36-year-old Puerto Rican actor, playwright, composer, rapper and writer’s Broadway musical nudged past Disney blockbuster The Lion King to top the Broadway box office end of the year chart.
Hamilton ended the year earning $105.5 million, besting The Lion King ($103.2 million) by a nose.
The show’s hugely profitable year comes as little surprise given the ultra-high demand for tickets and the rising prices of premium seats.
Over Thanksgiving, Hamilton became the first Broadway show to earn more than $3 million in a single eight-performance week.
Although Broadway bookkeeping mostly follows a season calendar that begins and ends in May, the year-end box office tallies nonetheless provide a good mid-season snapshot of the health of the Broadway industry. With box office measured in weekly increments that run Monday through Sunday, bookkeepers at the Broadway League are counting the week ending December 25 as the end of the 52-week year, with the 2017 calendar year beginning this week.
Hamilton and the 19-year-old Lion King, which had been the biggest earner on the street for the previous three calendar years, were the only two shows to earn more than $100 million in 2016.
Another of Broadway’s consistent hot tickets, Wicked ($89 million), followed them on the chart, with Disney’s Aladdin ($78.2 million) and The Book of Mormon ($70.6 million) rounding out the Top 5.