Hotstar: PJ Masks Live! It’s Time To Be A (Ticket Selling) Hero!

PJ Masks © Frog Box / Entertainment One UK Limited / Walt Disney EMEA Productions Limited 2014. – PJ Masks Live!

Concert promoters and booking agents are always on the lookout for the next big ticket seller – scouring SoundCloud for the latest hit song or going to the darkest, hippest raves to find the next big EDM act – but sometimes that big thing is right under your nose, at least if you have kids.

“I have a daughter who is 4 and she loved the show,” Stephen Shaw, president of “PJ Masks Live” producer and promoter Round Room Live, told Pollstar when asked how he became interested in the TV show, which is kind of a preschool version of the whole superhero thing. 

Shaw, who previously worked with famed concert promoter Michael Cohl as president of S2BN Entertainment, said it was obvious the show had enough demand to sustain a live tour.  

“There’s metrics you can use – how many views they have on YouTube, their broadcast viewership numbers, you see their merch numbers, even if you just walk into any Target in North America and see what their displays look like,” Shaw said.  

The “PJ Masks” brand is ubiquitous to parents of the preschool and kindergarten set, with kids everywhere wearing the clothes, pretending to be the characters on the playground and even needing Band-Aids adorned with the pajama-clad crime fighters when things get out of hand. 

“PJ Masks Live” kicked off in fall 2017 and has already hit 62 markets playing 84 shows. The latest tour leg includes tertiary markets like Casper, Wyo., and four different cities in Montana. 

That’s after doing gangbusters in the major markets like New York City (six shows at Hulu Theatre at Madison Square Garden, 17,625 tickets, $969,831 gross Oct. 14-15), another six at Chicago Theatre ($397,155 gross) and six more at Wang Theatre in Boston, which sold out six shows and grossed $430,300.  It’s far from kids’ stuff – with often three shows per day, and each show as long as a feature film.

Most recently, the production sold about 3,000 tickets each in Albany and Rochester, N.Y., April 28-29, according to WME booking agent Ryan Jones. 

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“We weren’t planning on doing a second tour of North America until we were ready to do our second show, which is forecasted for Q1-Q2 of 2019, but promoters came and said we want to do more dates,” Shaw said, adding that the fall leg sold more than 135,000 tickets. The second leg, April 17 to June 10, is hitting another 48 markets and 56 performances, with “not one repeat.”

“PJ Masks” follows the tales of three otherwise normal elementary school kids who at night put on their superhero pajamas and become masked crime fighters known as Catboy, Gekko and Owlette who take on the not-quite-menacing mad scientist Romeo, Luna Girl and Night Ninja. While the show is distributed by Disney Jr., it is created and produced by Entertainment One, which recently acquired Round Room and also produces “Peppa Pig,” which has its own live production.

Shaw has experience with theatrical shows with S2BN, which he said was an “honor and privilege I’ll never forget,” and referred to Cohl as one of the “great live music impresarios.” 

Canadian himself, Shaw has already acquired the rights to another kids show for a Canada-only touring production, this one called “Ranger Rob” that airs only in Canada.