After two years of capturing audiences’ attention and performers’ limbs, Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark will end its run on Broadway, grateful it still has the ability to run at all. The Wall Street Journal reports that the show will close in January, hoping to “cut losses” in a way that is not, for once, a euphemism for expendable actors, as the musical has been running for weeks now well below the “break-even point”—in a way that, again, is not a euphemism for clean bone fractures that should heal nicely, so no need to contact the union. As you may recall, the show—what with its splashy Bono songs and splashier, actor-stained orchestra pit—was the most expensive Broadway production in history, even before it began doling out settlement payments to physically injured players and an emotionally wounded Julie Taymor.
And while its popularity (and a gladiator-arena-like bloodlust) propelled it to around $1 million in ticket sales each week, as Variety reports, the show cost $1.2 million per week just to produce, leaving the show suspended in a treacherous limbo, all while the Green Goblin improvised a little song on the piano. So now it will shut down, though its ever-optimistic producers believe it will reopen in 2015 in the more forgiving town of Las Vegas, where people know how to ignore a desperate scream in the night.