Hadestown: The Musical has surpassed Hamilton to become the highest-grossing live capture of a stage musical ever at the domestic box office. The Bleecker Street release brought in $2 million in its second weekend across 1,567 screens, pushing its cumulative domestic total to $18.2 million, according to Deadline. Domestic, in industry terms, means the United States and Canada combined.

The film also landed at No. 6 on the domestic box office chart for the weekend — a strong hold for a specialised release in a market dominated by studio tentpoles.

Hamilton, released by Disney in September 2025 to mark the musical's tenth anniversary on Broadway, had topped out at roughly $17 million domestic plus another $4 million internationally. That film had originally premiered on Disney+ in July 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when theatrical releases were largely impossible. Its 2025 theatrical run gave audiences who had only streamed it a chance to see it on the big screen.

Hadestown took a different path. Captured from the West End production featuring the original principal cast, it went straight to cinemas rather than streaming first. The strategy paid off from the start: the film grossed $1.5 million in Thursday previews alone, then opened to $9.69 million on 1,949 screens — the second biggest opening ever for a Broadway live capture picture, behind only Hamilton, per Deadline.

The source material carries serious pedigree. Hadestown won eight Tony Awards in 2019, including Best Musical, and took home the 2020 Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. The show reimagines the Orpheus and Eurydice myth through a folk and jazz-inflected score by Anaïs Mitchell.

What makes this result notable is the category itself. Live capture films — theatrical recordings of stage productions, as opposed to staged adaptations shot like conventional movies — occupy a narrow commercial niche. Audiences for these releases tend to be fans of the show, not general moviegoers, which makes sustained attendance over multiple weekends harder to achieve. Hadestown's second-weekend gross represents a roughly 79 percent drop from its opening, steep in absolute terms but typical for an event-style release front-loaded with devoted fans.

For Bleecker Street, an independent distributor best known for arthouse and specialty titles, the result ranks among its highest-grossing releases. The film overtook Hamilton's domestic total in just two weekends of release.

Whether Hadestown: The Musical extends its lead further will depend on how broadly it can reach beyond the show's existing fanbase in the coming weeks.