U2 Grosses $126.2 Million With ‘Experience + Innocence’ Trek

Kevin Mazur / Getty Images / NLM – U2

Final box office tallies are in for U2’s Experience + Innocence tour that spanned just over six months this year with treks through North America and Europe. 

The iconic Irish band sold out 59 performances in 30 arenas on both continents, racking up $126,188,794 in sales. The final ticket count from the Live Nation-produced tour hit 927,034.

With those final totals, the band is on track to rank among the highest-grossing arena tours of the year, joining such artists as Pink, Bruno Mars and Justin Timberlake with tours that have topped $100 million in sales in arena-sized venues. Final box office counts for the year’s hottest tours will land in Pollstar’s Year-End issue that will be published in December.

U2 went home for the Experience + Innocence tour’s final multiple-show run and played four nights at Dublin’s 3Arena, scoring a $6.4 million gross from 46,529 sold seats on Nov. 5-6, 9-10. That tops the sales from the group’s last four-show stint at the arena in 2015 by $1.2 million.

The Dublin venue ranked fourth overall this year based on box office earnings on the trek. The top grosser was AccorHotels Arena in Paris with a four-night engagement that produced $9.4 million in revenue from 72,412 sold tickets. It was the first facility with a four-show run booked on the tour and one of only three. Along with the arenas in Dublin and Paris, U2 also played four nights at Milan’s Mediolanum Forum on Oct. 11-12, 15-16, grossing $7 million from 50,661 fans.

In North America, New York City’s Madison Square Garden had the best box office results, earning $8.7 million to rank as the second-highest grossing arena on the entire tour. The venue moved a total of 55,575 tickets for concerts on June 25-26 and July 1.

The wrap of the Experience + Innocence tour marked the end of a four-year span on the road for U2 that began with the Innocence + Experience trek in 2015. Along with this year’s jaunt and the 2017 stadium run to celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree album, the band’s total number of headlining concerts reached 185. Combined sales from all three tours total $594 million from 4.9 million total tickets.