Bleecker Street had the biggest opening weekend in its history with filmed stage feature “Hadestown: The Musical.” That’s a coup for specialized releasing, which never seems to escape the vortex of bad news; for Broadway lovers who might never be able to see the still-running, Tony-winning show; and for a counterintuitive logic that deserves a much bigger platform.
Filmmakers, distributors, and other executives, please take note: Your excellent taste may or may not have anything to do with what audiences want to see.
Released via Bleecker’s event-cinema label Crosswalk, “Hadestown” grossed $10.25 million in its domestic debut. Bleecker CEO Kent Sanderson, by his own admission, is not a Broadway person.
Sanderson loves Spinal Tap. Bleecker handled the 41st anniversary of “This is Spinal Tap” and “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues” last year. Combined, their domestic total was about $3.6 million.
In a way, that well-intentioned flop fueled the Crosswalk thesis: Take yourself out of it. In January, it released K-pop concert film “Stray Kids: The dominATE Experience” — not that Sanderson had the faintest interest in K-pop. Before “Hadestown,” it was Bleecker’s biggest box-office success of the year.
“I’d never heard of ‘Stray Kids’ before the movie was put on my radar,” Sanderson said over Zoom. “But what we do is we run things through their paces, in every way we can. We try to defeat our own assumptions.”
That means using data — everything from Spotify streams to YouGov polling — to see the audience for who and what it really is, personal opinions be damned. Sanderson said the roots of the “Hadestown” success came from Bleecker Street’s founder and his mentor, the late Andrew Karpen, who saw the opportunity to distribute the live-capture “Waitress: The Musical” in 2023.
“I had no inclination at the time,” Sanderson said. “I didn’t realize that there was an obsessive fan base until I was sitting with a friend while I was working on the deal… He goes, ‘Oh my God, ‘Waitress,’ I’ve seen that show four times.’ It’s like, you saw a single Broadway musical four times? ‘Waitress’ and ‘Hadestown’ share that.” Executive producer Kevin Iwashina advised the film’s producers in constructing the “Hadestown” deal.
I’ve written a lot about a shift in how creative work gets made. The auteur model, where a work emerges fully formed, is giving way to something more iterative. Creators put out work, get a response, adjust. The audience becomes essential to the creative process.
This is different. Drawing from Greek myths, Anaïs Mitchell wrote the “Hadestown” book, music, and lyrics. It’s evolved many times since it was first performed in 2006, becoming a concept album before it moved to Broadway. Still, it’s a complete and singular piece of work. What happened here is Bleecker adopted the creator economy’s central habit: Don’t presume your instinct is the market.
When I told Sanderson that this sounded less like a question of taste than of ego, he didn’t hesitate: “Yeah, it is taking your ego out of it,” he said. “That’s literally the thesis of this entire business, is taking myself out of it. Taking the taste of my acquisitions team out of it, and really just meeting the audience where they are and delivering them the stuff that they want regardless of what I personally respond to.” (Of note: The top-grossing “Hadestown” theater was in Orlando, Florida. “By a wide margin,” he said.)
Specialized distribution has run for decades on the premise — to filmmakers, to audiences, to itself — of curatorial authority. The eye is the product. Sanderson argues that the eye also can be a liability.
Taste creates instinct that can feel as acute as a paper cut, but it also can be dead wrong. The better approach may mean fighting your own confirmation bias to find the specific signals that tell the story.
For “Hadestown,” that meant looking at its eight Tony awards, weighting the consistency of Broadway grosses over full houses, and its success as a touring show. Sanderson discounted strong Spotify figures: “Is a Spotify stream a false flag because people think of this as an album?” he said. “I didn’t quite know what to make of it.”
Sanderson doesn’t see “Hadestown” as a one-off success. He and his team are already running data exercises on future acquisitions that may or may not have anything to do with what they love most. The formula is knowing there is no singular formula. “It’s literally just knowing what you don’t know, and finding whatever research you can,” he said.
This method isn’t universal. Sanderson is a huge fan of Mike Leigh and looks forward to releasing his “Tender Loving Care” later this year, “but it’s not like it’s going to be like, ‘Be there for Mike week one nationwide.’ That’s a much more traditional art house rollout. I still get to champion filmmakers and work on narrative movies. I went to film school for a reason. But this is something additional to our core business that I’m really excited to continue building.”
It’s a business that succeeds by not letting a point of view stand in for evidence. Of course, successes also create a feedback loop that can start to feel like instinct — the thing you tried to correct for in the first place.
“I’ve come to love ‘Hadestown,’” Sanderson said. “I watched an hour of it last night just because I’ve grown attached.”