Green Day, Fall Out Boy and Weezer Crush ‘Hella Mega’ Stadium Run: 2021 Year End, The Great Return

Timothy Hiatt / Getty Images – Seeing Green
Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong shreds during the “Hella Mega Tour” stop at Chicago’s Wrigley Field on Aug. 15, 2021.

Three bands are better than one – at least, that’s what “The Hella Mega Tour,” the long-awaited stadium run that featured Green Day, Fall Out Boy and Weezer, and ranked No. 3 on Pollstar’s Year End Worldwide Tours chart with a gross of $67.3 million, seems to suggest. 

Originally announced in September 2019 as a 2020 summer tour, “Hella Mega” united three alt-rock titans, an admirable feat in and of itself that was made possible by the bands’ shared management company, Crush Music.

“I don’t know if this tour would have happened if we didn’t have Crush management managing all three artists,” said CAA agent Jenna Adler, who represents Green Day, in an October Pollstar cover story. “It’s not easy to have three arena-sized artists on their own all come together to do it as one big collective.”

 And that’s before the coronavirus pandemic forced the tour’s postponement and rescheduling. Adler had carefully crafted the run in conjunction with Crush and Ryan McElrath, Live Nation senior vice president of global touring, around the baseball schedules of ballparks throughout the country, and the “Hella Mega” team had to get creative to assemble a viable 2021 itinerary. After all, it was important to all three bands and their teams to be industry leaders as the live business restarted after its COVID-related pause.

“We have to bring this world back to some normalcy, if we can go out safely and everybody’s in agreement,” Adler recalled telling the “Hella Mega” team, and noted the artists’ desire “to lead these people and all of us out of this pandemic.”

“Hella Mega” opened at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas, on July 24 – not just the tour’s first show, but the new stadium’s first-ever concert – with a gross of $3.2 million, kicking off an impressive 20-date run that affirmed the clout of both alt-rock and package touring at the stadium level. The tour’s top-grossing stop, an Aug. 4 concert at New York’s Citi Field, netted $4.7 million, and six other “Hella Mega” shows, including gigs at Chicago’s Wrigley Field and Seattle’s T-Mobile Park, cracked $4 million. Five more dates surpassed 

$3 million, and only one came in under $2 million. The run’s highest sold-ticket count came at Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium, where the bill moved 41,898 tickets. All told, “Hella Mega” averaged 32,953 tickets sold and more than $3.3 million grossed per stop.

Like every 2021 tour, “Hella Mega” had to contend with stringent COVID protocols, and even so, Fall Out Boy had to sit out three stops on the run – New York, Boston and D.C. – when a member of its team tested positive. Still, Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo told Pollstar that although “it was an incredibly difficult and complicated endeavor,” from his vantage point there “seemed to be fewer problems than on a normal tour.” 

“There are so many different managers and artists across the industry right now that are saying, ‘How do you replicate “Hella Mega”?’” Adler said. “If you want to play stadiums, why not combine all these efforts and star power?”

To wit, “Hella Mega” isn’t done quite yet: Green Day, Fall Out Boy and Weezer will descend on Europe for eight shows in June and July 2022.