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Christmas week was reliably bountiful for Broadway, with early reports of record-breaking grosses for the holiday period coming in hours before the official numbers are released by the Broadway League this afternoon.
With news of more house record-busters likely to drift in throughout the day, preliminary numbers are more than impressive for Stranger Things: The First Shadow, Ragtime, Just In Time and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
For the Broadway week ending Sunday, December 28, Stranger Things: The First Shadow stared down any otherworldly demons to set a new nine-performance house record at the Marquis Theatre. The week’s gross of $2,510,948 easily surpasses the show’s previous best-ever of $1,917,541 set just a week before. Granted, the more recent figure covers nine performances rather than the usual eight – holiday weeks often include extra performances – but Broadway’s Stranger Things mightn’t have needed the assist: The Broadway production has been thoroughly reinvigorated by the return last month of Netflix’s TV series.
With new Netflix episodes landing in November and December, fans are finding that the play – generally thought to be a standalone prequel – turns out to have some decided connections to the series’ latest developments. Just one example: In Stranger Things: The First Shadow, some rather cryptic (and unexplained) remarks are made about Henry Creel’s long-ago (and traumatic) visit to a cave near his home. The most recent batch of TV episodes shows just what Henry saw – and did – in that cave that left him forever changed.
Broadway and West End box office figures for Shadow have seen the results: Box office for both stage productions have hit what appears to be sustained increases, with ticket sales at their highest levels since the initial launches of both productions.
To further the connections between the stage show and the TV show, producers of both gave some lucky Broadway attendees a real surprise at the end of the evening performance on December 19. In a sort of epilogue scene during the final moments of the play that depict Henry Creel taking a big step toward becoming the evil Vecna, the play’s usual Henry, the fantastic Louis McCartney, gave the stage over to Jamie Campbell Bower, TV’s Henry. The connection between the Stranger Things universes of stage and screen got a lot closer.
Also feeling the holiday bounty was Broadway’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, grossing a house record at the Lyric Theatre of $3,709,875 for the nine-performance week ending December 28. Cursed Child had set the the previous eight-performance house record of $3,152,533 for the week ending November 30, 2025, which happened to include the Thanksgiving holiday.
Like First Shadow, Cursed Child has gotten a recent boost from some stage-screen crossover: Tom Felton recently joined the Broadway cast as Draco Malfoy, the role he played inthe Potter film franchise (in the stage sequel he plays the adult Draco, while in the films he was the child Draco). Felton’s arrival reinvigorated the Broadway box office of the nearly eight-year-old Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Felton continues in the role through May 10, 2026.
Also have a snazzy holiday week was Just In Time, the cool cat Bobby Darin bio-musical starring a knock-’em-dead Jonathan Groff, who’s in the role until March 29 (a replacement hasn’t been named). Although final figures for the week have not yet been released, sources say the holiday week saw Just In Time smashing Circle In The Square’s weekly gross record with the popular production’s highest grossing week to date. That means the Christmas Week figure must be steeper than Just In Time‘s previous record high of $1,470,023 reported for the week ending December 14.
One of the current fall season’s unqualified musical successes is Ragtime, and Christmas Week was no outlier. The non-profit Lincoln Center Theater’s glorious revival of the musical first staged on Broadway in 1998 has been selling out consistently since previewing in October. Starring Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy, Brandon Uranowitz, Colin Donnell, Ben Levi Ross and Shaina Taub, Ragtime, based on the E.L. Doctorow novel, broke the box office record at LCT’s Vivian Beaumont Theater with a Christmas Week gross of $1,588,107 (the venue’s previous record holder was My Fair Lady).
The full box office report for the week ending December 28 will be posted later this afternoon.