The Broadway/
Hollywood
Relationship

By: Dan Watkins

Patrick Healy's excellent New York Times feature
explores the increasingly dynamic relationship between Hollywood and Broadway.  Although stage musicals have spawned films and vice versa for some time, the advent of the Broadway “mega-hit” has generated significantly more studio involvement in the development and financing of musicals recently.

Broadway provides Hollywood studios with an avenue for the exploitation of their catalogues, an arena for the development of new properties which may eventually become films, and an attractive financial model as compared with big-budget films.  For example, Universal owns the stage and film rights to the book Wicked, plans to produce a film based on the musical and, according to Healy, Universal’s investment in the musical Wicked is on track to become “the most profitable venture in the 101-year history of Universal.”

There are at least two take-aways here.  One is that despite our increasingly crowd-sourced culture, the partnership between Hollywood and Broadway means that a relatively small number of people in the San Fernando Valley and Midtown Manhattan continue to determine which stories are told and retold in multiple mediums.  Second, the partnership between Hollywood and Broadway is a powerful example of two industries working together to solve thorny problems inherent in their respective models: Broadway satisfies Hollywood’s need for new revenue streams and development, while Hollywood provides Broadway with otherwise-elusive financial capital and underlying rights.  It’s a relationship that could inspire other industries to similarly partner to solve core problems in their own business models.