You may have heard that Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe is opening in his first Broadway musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in March. Of course they are expecting the show to run for a while. Meanwhile, Deathly Hallows Part 2 is opening in July and Radcliffe is expected to help promote the movie, attend the premiere(s), etc.
So apparently Warner Bros. has bought up a half a million dollars’ worth of tickets to the Broadway show so that he can go to London and wherever and do this stuff. The story is that they are really ticked off about this added expense (although maybe that’s part of the hype machine).
So my question is – why is this a surprise? Surely busy working actors have scheduling clashes all the time. Is it the dollar amount? Could Warners have put something in Radcliffe’s contract about “You hereby promise not to star in Broadway musicals and hence be unavailable to do promo work for something you finished a year ago…”? How does this work?
Presumably when he finished the last two movies a year ago, he didn’t and couldn’t know when they planned the release dates and couldn’t just leave his schedule wide open for months. And actually, there are articles from the New York Times of April 2010 that he was scheduled to appear in this musical in Spring 2011. So if anything the Broadway show has been planned for longer than the movie premiere.
Probably because most of the time when studios talk about expenses they’re lying. They’ll count something as an expense when it’s really just moving money around within the company. But this was money that genuinely left the company and went into somebody else’s pocket.
I looked at the article again. Wow: $500,000 is for only five nights. So assuming the theatre can sell out every seat in the house, that’s $100,000 a night. I guess that means the Hirschfeld can seat just under 1,000 people (tickets seem to be going for around $100 - $200, with the “Premium” seats at $250 or so).
My question would be whether Radcliffe’s participation in promoting the movie will have any effect at all on ticket sales. Why would it matter in the slightest to the Box Office if he goes on Jay Leno or does the parade of interviews with entertainment magazines. This is not some little known indie film or something. It’s the last installment of an already extremely well-established, super-hyped franchise. Do they think the movie is going tank if little little Danny doesn’t go on Conan or Entertainment Tonight or whatever? I don’t think it would make a penny’s worth of difference. They’re wasting their money by buying out his Broadway Show tickets. This franchise is over-promoted already.
Yup, they aren’t just buying Broadway seats, they are buying a fuckton of publicity for the premiere since everyone is talking about it. $500,000 sounds like a bargain.
It’s the last movie - this is a Big Effing Deal. It would be terrible if he didn’t do publicity, he’s the star. The other actors are going to do publicity too, but if he’s missing - it would be as if there was a hypothetical Celebration of the Three Stooges at Lincoln Center, attended by celebrities and bigwigs, and at the end of the retrospective, out comes Curley and Larry. “Moe couldn’t make it tonight, he has a gig in Bayonne. Sends his regards, said being a part of the Stooges has been swell.”
Look at the beginning of the news story linked in the OP. It says, “Bosses at Warner Bros. have reportedly . . .” Reportedly? When a dollar figure is mentioned in a news story about film studios, it’s quite possible that it’s exaggerated.
Furthermore, there’s no mention of what the theater is doing during that week. Maybe all they are doing is putting in Radcliffe’s understudy for the week. Maybe the producers of the film have agreed just to pay a much smaller figure than $500,000 for the right to take Radcliffe away from the show for the week, which will be enough to compensate the theater for the difference between how much money they would make with Radcliffe and how much they would make with his understudy.
Oh! See, I pictured the box office is telling people that there will be no performances from dates X to Y, the theatre stands empty those nights, and everybody gets some time off. Do the cast and crew and orchestra still get paid? But I didn’t think of an understudy (how disappointing that would be! I came to see DANIEL RADCLIFFE!).
They normally do cover this sort of thing. I imagine that splitting the movies into two and releasing them on seperate dates might have caused some revision to the contracts, however.
And that’s why being an understudy is hard. A close friend was the understudy for Donny Osmond in ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat’. Donny is apparently a really good guy, down to earth, friendly and he fully understood that many in the audience were there to see him and they deserved his presence in the show. That being said, it’s too much to expect someone to remain completely healthy 8 shows a week for a year and a half.
When they made that announcement ‘For tonight’s performance, the role of Joseph, usually performed by Donny Osmond, will be performed by V. A.’, there would be a 2 to 3 second’s silence, followed by the sound of 2,000 people groaning audibly. Not the most reassuring thing to hear from upstage of the curtain.
I wonder how the contracts deal with the studios’ tendency to play with release dates as well. When the actors sign a contract to be in a movie, the release is probably at least 2 years away, especially for an effects-heavy movie like the HP series. I can’t imagine a contract really saying “For the next 2 years you agree to drop everything you’re doing to appear on the Today show and Conan if given 24 hours notice.”
No, the show has been canceled. Cite. They know people are there to see Daniel Radcliffe. There would be too many upset people to have the understudy go on for those three performances. The rule is that if an above-the-title actor calls out, then the audience has the right to walk out before the show starts (or during the first ten minutes or so) and ask for a refund. People who understudy major stars know this going in, and are prepared for that response.
a35362, to answer your question, I believe the cast and orchestra gets paid something for those canceled performances, but not full pay. I’m not 100% sure about that though, as I’ve never been in that situation. Also, the Hirschfeld has a seating capacity of 1,282 for musicals.
