How Tickets and Previews Worked During the Original Broadway Run

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark ran its box office and preview performances at the Foxwoods Theatre in New York from late 2010 through January 4, 2014. The production is no longer running, and this page describes how ticketing worked during that run rather than serving as a live booking page.

The show previewed for 182 performances before its official opening on June 14, 2011, the longest preview period Broadway had seen at that point, and one that turned the production into its own kind of box office event. Broadway grosses are reported weekly and published industry-wide, so a preview run stretching across seven months generated an unusually long public paper trail of its own, long before critics ever filed an official review.

Discounted preview pricing is a long-standing Broadway convention, not something unique to this production. Shows in previews are still being adjusted night to night, so box offices commonly price those early performances below the eventual regular run, and reporting from the period indicates Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark followed that same convention rather than charging full price from its first preview onward.

The Foxwoods Theatre itself carried a sponsorship name tied to a casino resort, a fairly common arrangement for large Broadway houses during that period, and the building underwent structural work to accommodate the production's flying sequences before performances began. Theatre capacity, house configuration, and the venue's aerial rigging all fed into how many seats were actually available for sale on a given preview night, since technical rehearsal needs sometimes limited how the house could be sold.

Calling this run a "box office record" is accurate but narrower than it sounds. The record in question is specifically about the preview count, not about total gross or longest overall run. Broadway has hosted much longer-running shows and much higher-grossing ones. What made this production notable at the box office was the shape of its run: an unusually long, unusually well-documented preview period followed by a standard multi-year commercial run once the show settled into its final form.

By some measures, the show set weekly Broadway box office records during parts of its run, driven as much by public curiosity about the production's much-discussed troubles as by reviews. That kind of publicity cuts both ways. It fills a house. It also means nearly every ticket sold during that period came with a story attached, whether the show wanted it or not.

If you've ever wondered why a Broadway show would willingly sell tickets to a production still being reworked night after night, the honest answer is that previews have always served that purpose. Audiences pay a lower price in exchange for seeing something the producers are still adjusting; this show simply took that arrangement further, and for longer, than almost any production before it.

Tickets for a production at this scale typically moved through several channels at once: the theatre's own box office, standard Broadway ticketing services, and third-party resale once demand for a specific date outpaced the house's capacity. Preview-era pricing structures generally applied only to the first of those channels; resale prices, driven by outside demand, followed their own logic entirely.

None of the booking mechanics described above apply today. A production this specific to its original Broadway run does not tour or restage the way a national tour production might, and no current box office is selling tickets to it. Readers looking for a fuller account of why the preview period ran as long as it did, and what that meant for the show's overall budget, can find that covered in more detail in the site's dedicated look at the production's record-setting budget.