Broadway's Monopoly Ended When Cats Hit Disney Plus

Andrew Lloyd Webber's 2023 revival of Cats closed in May, five months ahead of schedule.

The composer responded with what amounts to a funeral oration for Broadway itself. The theaters are emptying, the economic model is broken, and without intervention, he warned, the street will become a museum of its own past. This is not new panic. This is the echo of 1976.

In the mid-1970s, Broadway faced a genuine collapse in ticket sales so severe that the number of new productions dropped 40 percent in five years. The explanation was clear and widely believed. Television had killed theater, because why sit in a seat for three hours when you could stay home?

What actually happened was different. Broadway survived not because it proved the theory wrong but because liveness became more, not less, valuable. The 1981 original Cats run lasted 18 years because there was no other way to experience it. The 1980 film existed but was a different artifact, recorded and compressed and finite. You went to Broadway to be in a room with thousands of other people watching the same thing happening in front of you at that exact moment. That experience had no substitute.

The 2023 revival closed into a world where Disney+ has the 2019 film version on demand and YouTube has the 1980 version. The live performance no longer occupies a unique scarcity slot in the attention economy. It competes directly with versions that cost less, require no travel, pause on command, and never close. What changed is not the value of liveness but the saturation of recorded access. In 1981, you either came to the theater or you experienced a memory of having heard about it, while now you experience the thing itself, consumable and repeatable.

The theatrical production was always competing against recorded versions. It just had a monopoly on the recording for decades.

The variable that matters now is whether audiences who have already consumed the recorded version will pay theater prices to see the live one. Broadway in 1976 was competing against substitutes. Broadway now is competing against the same product in cheaper form. That is a different kind of danger entirely—and no amount of economic intervention addresses it if the audience has already seen the story and has already chosen the format they prefer.