Hadestown Surpasses Hamilton as Top Live Theater Capture

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- Hadestown: The Musical grossed $2M in week 2 on 1,567 screens, pushing its domestic cume to $18.2M and overtaking Disney's Hamilton to become the top-grossing live theater capture of a musical, landing at No. 6 domestically.
- Hadestown opened last weekend at $9.7M on 1,949 screens; the Bleecker Street release was captured from the West End production featuring the original principal cast.
- Hamilton's September 2025 Disney theatrical re-release peaked at roughly $17M domestic plus $4M international, though it had originally premiered on Disney+ in July 2020 during Covid.
- A24's The Invite crossed $20M with a $1.2M weekend on 792 screens, holding the No. 7 domestic spot in its seventh week.
- The Samurai And The Prisoner, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cannes-selected film from Janus Films, grossed $64.2K on 3 screens — the director's career-best per-screen average — with sellouts at IFC Center, Film at Lincoln Center, and Landmark Nuart; expanding to 20 screens next week.
- Wild Inside, a Sandbox Films documentary about NYC celebrity owl Flaco, debuted exclusively at IFC to $20K with multiple sellouts, after a Central Park world premiere attended by over 1,300 people; it's booked at 75 locations through August.
- The specialty results arrived during one of the biggest box office weekends in history, led by Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey.
Why it matters: Hadestown's $18.2M domestic cume in just two weekends has surpassed Hamilton's roughly $17M lifetime theatrical run — a striking result since Hamilton had a 10-year cultural head start and a Disney marketing machine behind its 2025 re-release. For Bleecker Street, the milestone confirms that a filmed stage musical with a recognizable principal cast can break through theatrically even against a $355M Spider-Man debut dominating the same weekend.




