Lloyd-Weber's "Phantom"...$3.2 effing BILLION in box office since opening

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

Phantom puts out Cats to smash record on Broadway
From James Bone in New York

AFTER 18 years of skulking in the catacombs, the Phantom of the Opera emerged from his lair last night to find himself the toast of Broadway. Andrew Lloyd Webber and the producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh joined former cast members for a masked ball to celebrate The Phantom of the Opera becoming the longest-running show in Broadway history.

With its 7,486th performance, the Gothic melodrama about a disfigured composer who haunts the Paris Opera and falls in love with the beautiful soprano Christine has broken the previous record set by Lloyd Webber’s Cats. “It’s overwhelming,” the composer said. “When I saw how Cats was going I did say to all my friends, ‘You realise that something like this could not happen again’. And then, of course, Phantom happened.”

The show has become the most valuable entertainment venture of all time since its world premiere at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London in 1986. Its worldwide box office of $3.2 billion (£1.8 billion) dwarfs even the $1.2 billion (£6.7 billion) earnings of Titanic, the highest-grossing film of all time.

The musical has been seen by more than 80 million people at more than 65,000 performances in 119 cities in 24 countries. It is now playing in London, New York, Budapest, Tokyo, São Paulo and Essen, with new productions planned in Taipei and Las Vegas.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-1977473,00.html

[terrya]

1. No accounting for taste

If people want to listen to forgettable, boring sap, they will, I guess.