“Hadestown: The Musical” has become the highest-grossing filmed capture of a live musical in box office history, edging past “Hamilton” in its second weekend of release. The Bleecker Street release added $2 million across 1,567 screens, lifting its domestic total to $18.2 million and landing it at No. 6 among all films this weekend.
The film, shot during the production’s run on London’s West End with its original five principal cast members, opened five days earlier to $9.7 million on nearly 2,000 screens, the second-largest debut ever for a live theater capture behind only “Hamilton.”
Disney’s 2025 release of “Hamilton,” timed to the stage show’s tenth Broadway anniversary, ultimately grossed about $17 million domestically after benefiting from years of pent-up demand and a title that had already streamed on Disney+ during the pandemic. “Hadestown” reached a comparable total in a fraction of the time and without a streaming release working against it.
Bleecker Street’s event-cinema label, Crosswalk, partnered with LD Entertainment to distribute the film, which was directed by Brett Sullivan and holds a 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Citing what the distributor called extraordinary demand, Crosswalk extended what was originally planned as a limited five-day run, adding theaters and showtimes on an ongoing basis rather than setting a fixed closing date.
Written by Anaïs Mitchell and directed for the stage by Rachel Chavkin, “Hadestown” won eight Tony Awards in 2019, including best musical, and took the Grammy for best musical theater album the following year. The production has run continuously on Broadway since its 2019 opening, expanded to the West End in 2024, and has toured North America since 2021, building the kind of sustained audience base that distributors say helped carry the film version into a crowded late-summer marketplace.
The musical’s box office run played out alongside one of the busiest weekends in industry history, with “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” “The Odyssey” and other studio releases dominating the wider chart. Elsewhere among independent titles, A24’s “The Invite” crossed $20 million in its seventh week, while Magnolia Pictures’ “I Want Your Sex” opened to $600,000 on 700 screens.
