What a difference a star can make. “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” is experiencing a remarkable surge in sales this fall thanks to the clever casting of Tom Felton as an adult version of the character he played in the films: Draco Malfoy.
The play’s producers said Monday that the show grossed $2.973 million last week, which is more than it has grossed during any previous week in its seven-year run. And the production will most likely gross even more this week, because of the Thanksgiving holiday, which is traditionally one of Broadway’s strongest stretches.
Felton joined the cast on Nov. 11, and is scheduled to remain in the show until May 10.
The grosses for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” have more than doubled since Felton’s arrival — a rare turnabout for a long-running show. The play grossed $1.3 million the week before he joined the cast (when there were eight performances), and the week he began it grossed $2.6 million (with just seven performances). Last week, with eight performances, it was just a hair under $3 million. But even that understates the importance of his arrival, because the show — with a large cast and extensive special effects that make it costly to run — had multiple money-losing weeks earlier this year when it grossed under $1 million. During the week that ended May 11, it grossed just $710,462.
The show’s previous top-grossing week was between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in 2023, when it grossed $2.7 million.
The producers declined to talk about Felton’s impact on the show’s financial performance, but it was clear from the moment they announced his casting last June that the move was of enormous interest to fans. The “Harry Potter” films — adapted from J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular series of fantasy novels — was released from 2001 to 2011, and Felton played Malfoy, a school bully and frequent antagonist of the title character, throughout the series.
Felton is the first member of the films’ cast to join the stage production, which is a sequel to the novels. The main characters in the films are seen in the stage production as adults, with children of their own. The opportunity to watch Felton, who is now 38, playing a grown-up version of the character he created on film, has proved irresistible to fans, at least so far, even though his character has limited stage time.
The play, written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany, who worked with Rowling on the story, is the most financially successful drama in the history of Broadway — it has grossed $444 million, and it won the Tony Award for best play in 2018. It is also still playing in London, where it began, and there are other productions around the world.
But sustaining it in New York has been trickier than anticipated, and the lead producers, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, have made major (and costly) changes to keep it going. The show began as a two-part drama, which proved too much for many potential ticket buyers, so over the pandemic it was consolidated to a one-part show, and then that one-part show was further trimmed.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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