Special Reports

10 Things You Could Buy With the Budget of Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark

Turns out, you can get a lot of stuff for $75 million.

Spider-Man vanquishes a trio of bank robbers in Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark.
Spider-Man vanquishes a trio of bank robbers in Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark.
(© 8 Legged Productions, LLC.)

Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark closed this past weekend after three years of offstage heart-in-your-throat dramatic tension (which also occasionally occurred onstage). Unfortunately, three years wasn’t nearly long enough to earn back the show’s $75 million budget.

So, as much as we enjoyed seeing Spider-Man‘s many iterations throughout the years, we couldn’t help but imagine all the fun we would have had if we’d had that much dough at our disposal in June 2011. We’re pretty sure we would have purchased, say, a couple of private islands.

Here’s a list of things you could buy with Spider-Man‘s $75 million budget:

1. 11 straight months flying in a private Gulfstream 550 plane at $8,640/hour.

2. 675,000,000 meals for hungry families via Feeding America.

3. 500,000,000 No. 2 pencils to pass out to students, artists, and indecisive crossword-puzzle enthusiasts at $0.15/pencil.

4. 15,000,000 Cronuts from Dominique Ansel at $5/piece.

5. 300 trips to space via Virgin Galactic at $250,000/ticket. (Or, you can take that trip with 299 of your closest friends.)

6. 19 thirty-second Super Bowl ads at $3.8 million/ad.

7. 757,575 memberships to TheaterMania’s Gold Club at $99/membership. Or, you could buy 1,271,186 student or teacher memberships at $59/membership. (There are 1.1 million students in New York City and 75,000 teachers, meaning you could buy every student and every teacher a Gold Club membership. And still have $96,186 left over).

8. 669,642 thirty-day Unlimited Ride Metro Cards at $112/Metro Card. (For the record, that’s 22,321 months. 1,833 years!)

9. A pair of premium seats to both Waiting for Godot and No Man's Land, which, including fees, costs $1019.50. At that price, you and your pal/spouse could see both Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land a total of 73,565 times.

10. Darby Island ($40 million) and Lighthouse Cay ($33.3 million) in the Bahamas. You’ll still have $1.7 million left over to pay some tiny portion of your insanely high taxes.

(Disclaimer: We’re pretty sure all the arithmetic contained herein is flawless. But we’re theater journalists, not mathematicians. Our sincerest apologies if you find that we could afford only 499,999,999 pencils.)

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