It’s long been a source of frustration for theater fanatics: many Broadway shows, even those that don’t become years-long fixtures of the Great White Way, are professionally filmed, but often only for archival purposes, not public consumption. For years, those living outside of the greater New York City area unwilling to make an expensive trip of seeing a particular show were limited to the hierarchy of a touring company, a local production, or maybe, some years later for a particularly notable show, an airing of a filmed version on PBS. If all else fails, they could hope for an inevitably disappointing film version that failed to recapture the onstage magic. Starting in 2005, there were also occasional Fathom Events presentations of filmed stage shows, typically made available for one or two nights at a time, at premium prices (and looking more like ultra-big TV than polished cinema, at least at first).

Lately, though, so-called “pro-shot” movies – those filmed versions that used to pop up on public television’s American Playhouse or Great Performances series, as with the 1989 version of Into the Woods, aired two years after shooting but decades before Disney got around to making its Meryl Streep version – have been elbowing their way to the front of the line as a Broadway alternative. The highest-profile pro-shot so far has been Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Hamilton, intended to debut on the big screen but thrown to Disney+ during the pandemic-inspired yearlong break from wide theatrical releases. No surprise that the sudden ability to watch the original cast perform the most talked-about Broadway show in years from the comfort of the couch became an at-home event.

It was a bit surprising, though, that five years later, Disney put Hamilton in movie theaters anyway – and that it cleaned up at the box office, despite or maybe because of how many fans already knew the show from a streaming service. By then, Hamilton was a pop-culture phenomenon featuring many now-familiar faces, inspiring fans attending at least one Manhattan theater to dress in costume for its opening night at the cinema (so, between Off-Broadway, Broadway, post-pandemic Broadway, and Disney+, at least its fifth opening night overall). Obviously that particular masterpiece draws particularly fanatical devotion.

So it shocked some analysts when, last month, a pro-shot version of Hadestown, an acclaimed, Tony-winning and long-running but not exactly Andrew Lloyd Webber-scale musical, made over $10m in a wide North American cinema release, on par with Hamilton’s first weekend. Maybe some credit is due to the savvy timing of putting a musical that retells two major Greek myths in theaters simultaneously with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey; regardless, a five-days-only release was quickly extended, and while Hadestown (like Hamilton and other highly fan-driven events) dropped hard in subsequent weekends, it has collected over $20m so far. That’s actually a bit more than the 2025 Hamilton release; it also made more than the last Jackass movie, an Elvis Presley concert film, and recent wide-release movies starring Hugh Jackman, Jason Statham and Nate Bargatze.

This week in the US, SIX The Musical Live! follows Hadestown into theaters, with a pro-shot version of the original West End production that takes a modernized look at the six wives of Henry VIII via a singing-contest framework. In October, movie star Rose Byrne will not be reprising her recent Broadway role in the revival of Fallen Angels for a film version; instead, the performance itself will be released directly to theaters. These aren’t coming from theater companies, either; Hadestown was a hit for the indie distributor Bleecker Street, while SIX is being put out by Universal. Suddenly your movie-ticketing app might start to look more like those “how many have you seen?” visual indices printed in the back of Broadway Playbills. Even shows that haven’t made it to theaters are getting splashier treatments: last summer, George Clooney’s Broadway debut in a stage version of his film Good Night, and Good Luck (casting him in a different, more central role than in the 2005 movie) aired live on CNN – a Broadway first – and eventually turned up on Netflix, where it’s currently streaming.

Pro-shot Broadway shows at the cinema sit at the confluence of multiple observable post-pandemic cultural trends: as actually attending Broadway shows has become prohibitively expensive (especially for out-of-towners who may not have the flexibility to try various lotteries, day-of ticket sales, or just plain waiting out high demand), movie theaters have also become more flexible about what kind of material fills their auditoriums, and for how long. For years, most mainstream multiplexes booked movies in standard two-week blocks. Now Fathom Event-style limited revivals have become so popular that theaters and distributors have realized they don’t need to go through one particular company to show re-releases, big-ticket TV shows and you-are-there simulations of theatrical events. It’s a tribute to the flexibility of the movie theater as a public space – not least because hardcore theater fans probably know that pro-shots are more available at home than ever before, even beyond Hamilton. Naturally, there’s a streaming channel for that: BroadwayHD has livestreamed some productions, and has a library of titles, including some former hot tickets nonetheless unlikely to return in that particular form, like Hugh Jackman starring in Oklahoma!

That was a production unlikely to be made into a “real” movie, and it’s hard to tell whether the accessibility of more Broadway shows will diminish the perceived appetite for full-on cinematic adaptations – or be seen as proof-of-concept that it need not take 20 years of audience-building to draw crowds to the multiplex. In fact, some of the longest-awaited movie versions – 2004’s The Phantom of the Opera, 2019’s Cats, even the less lengthy, but equally storied Rent, which came to screens with much of the original cast in 2005 – have been some of the least satisfying Broadway adaptations. On the other hand, the relatively swift commemoration of the Broadway blockbuster The Producers, with Tony darlings Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick intact in the leads and joined by movie stars Will Ferrell and Uma Thurman, is one of the flop-sweatiest movie musicals ever made. A pro-shot probably would have more easily preserved the material’s reputation as an all-timer with the general public.

Favoring the pro-shot does feel in line with certain 21st-century fandom trends, where some acolytes prioritize (or claim to prioritize, anyway) absolute fidelity over all else when it comes to seeing movies of their favorite books, comics or video games. It also might dilute the ephemeral magic of live theater, where part of the point is that sometimes-invisible interaction between performer and audience. The movie-theater experience of pro-shot theater, then, however makeshift, could be more important than a mere revenue stream. Maybe wider release of these records of original-cast productions – in addition to the greater good of preserving art that favored the rich and the lucky – will keep alive the notion that a lot of art does have that public component, and that a hard-to-get ticket isn’t the only way to access it.