The Hollywood Reporter (Weekly)
Beyond Broadway: Filmed Production Flourishes in Pandemic Era
Producers increasingly are viewing filmed plays and musicals not as a threat to live shows, but as part of their promotional campaign and as an ancillary revenue stream
It’s a Wednesday evening in April and Girl From the North Country director Conor McPherson is firmly fixed in the house of Belasco Theatre amid a mass of glowing monitors, longlegged cameras and a towering crane, as his cast and stage crew ready for the final shots of the day. The effort — a digital capture headed up by Totally Theatre Productions’ executive producer Gavin Kalin and director Tim van Someren — was months in the making and comes just days before the limited engagement is set to reopen on Broadway after an unprecedented hiatus amid the winter omicron wave.
“I think producers are thinking it’s great to have a capture because it actually helps the live performance,” McPherson says about the growing interest in filmed versions of Broadway shows. “There’s an argument now, which is that because people know it’s a theater experience, theatergoers may watch it but then that might make them want to go see it.”
Amid a mix of pandemicrelated struggles and shifting industry opinions on protecting the live performance experience (as well as the Broadway box office), producers have increasingly pivoted from the idea that digital captures are a threat to their shows. Instead, many now consider them an additive part of their production’s run, sometimes as early as they begin development on the live show itself.
Austin Shaw, a onetime Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborator and producer on the upcoming filmed production of the West End’s Anything Goes, says: “The general attitude of stage producers has moved from ‘If you film it, you will kill my show and I’m going to put the closing notices up,’ to now, actually filming the show is, one, possibly the best piece of marketing you’ll ever do for the show, and secondly, once the show does close, it can provide an ongoing income revenue stream to invest in the future and development of new work.”
While the global pandemic helped fuel a desire for filmed versions and digital captures, they’ve long been around — the result of a swinging pendulum of industry interest that picked up steam during the ’90s. Funding and revenue availability, as well as the willingness of producers to have a team come in to shoot, have remained some of the
biggest influences on whether a stage show gets a filmed version.
Having the time to film is also a factor, and it abounded once the industry realized theater’s pause was going to last for months, with neither ticket sales to prioritize nor a live experience that could be disrupted by a camera. “Plus, we’d had this perfect period where people got used to remote viewing, whether it’s Zoom calls or streaming, and where those technologies became more reliable and better quality,” van Someren says.
This climate also gave streamers a boost, with Netflix, Apple TV+ and Disney+ among those that began scooping up filmed shows during the pandemic to beef up their original, branddistinct content amid COVID production pauses.
“These folks want to make really great things, champion great things or license really great things to put in front of their audience,” says Dave Sirulnick,
president of entertainment at RadicalMedia, the company behind “cinematic interpretations” of Hamilton and the Spike Lee-directed American Utopia.
“They’re looking to continue a relationship with every viewer.”
In the past, distribution models supported a play’s airing on TV, exclusively in theaters through special event screenings, and via at-home releases back to the days of VHS. But the arrival of streaming led that format to quickly become the future due to being “affordable and accessible,” while helping expand a show’s brand and audience, according to producer and BroadwayHD co-founder Bonnie Comley.
“[Industry people] are now seeing it for what it is, which is a marketing asset,” she adds.
Streaming deals have delivered lucrative results for a handful of Broadway producers, with THR
previously reporting that Disney paid $75 million to distribute
Hamilton’s filmed performance (a planned theatrical debut was scrapped for streaming on Disney+ because of the pandemic). But even as interest in digital captures has grown, multimillion-dollar paydays are still outliers, say multiple sources familiar with digital capture deals. Filmed versions of stage shows have generally garnered just $100,000 on the licensing alone, from a production price tag that can start at $1 million and go as high as $10 million, depending on the project.
Great Performances executive producer David Horn says he’s “not sure where we are in the cycle” of interest for filmed shows after the pandemic and the mixed results of bigger distribution deals for filmed versions of shows like
Come From Away amid the critical failure of others like Diana:
The Musical.
But he says the cycle — and digital captures — will continue, at the very least on PBS. “I’ve seen people lose interest and find out there’s not a financial gold mine. But we’re still here,” Horn says. “As long as it’s quality and artistically sound, it works for us.”