Boxoffice Insider: Michael Bublé, New Tour, Old Tour & Vegas

It’s been a year of both beginnings and endings for Michael Bublé who is currently on the road during this last half of 2022, touring with a full orchestra, a stage full of backing musicians and new music from his eleventh studio album Higher, released earlier this year on March 25. The tour – the seventh of his two-decade career – kicked off in support of the new album in August with arena dates planned in North America through October.

Just one month earlier, however, he was attending to old business as he completed a series of postponed outdoor dates in Europe as part of his “An Evening with Michael Bublé” tour that kicked off in 2019 and endured multiple postponements over the next two years due to the pandemic. His upcoming schedule this fall will also include a November trek in three South American countries, the final set of rescheduled 2020 dates originally booked on the earlier tour.

Along with both tours, 2022 also saw the Canadian singer join the ranks of Las Vegas resident artists with the debut of his limited engagement at The Theatre at Resorts World. With three shows the final week of April and three more the first week of May, he performed for 24,456 fans at the world-class venue that opened its doors last December.

Promoted by Beaver Productions, the “Higher” tour began this summer on Aug. 8 at Gas South Arena in Duluth, Georgia and is now about halfway through its run through U.S. and Canadian cities. So far, box-office reports have been submitted from 18 arenas on the trek for a total ticket count of 162,959. The combined gross from the first 18 shows is $19.38 million.

The best box-office results on the tour currently are held by two venues. The first is FLA Live Arena in Sunrise, Florida with the highest gross reported for one performance. The Fort Lauderdale-area venue recorded earnings of $1.67 million on Aug. 12 based on the sale of 11,152 tickets. Yet, the most tickets for one show were sold in Dallas at American Airlines Center on Sept. 16. The arena recorded 11,585 sold seats for a performance that grossed $1.39 million.

In Europe during July, he played 15 shows produced by AEG Presents, all booked in U.K. cities. During the month-long run, he sold 185,356 tickets at 14 venues for a box-office haul of $19.09 million (USD). Bath was the only city to host the tour for two nights with open-air concerts July 15-16 on the lawns of the Royal Crescent. The multiple-show event logged the top box-office numbers in Europe with attendance of 27,692 and a $2.93 million gross. Bublé’s shows marked the first time a concert had been staged at the site since The Three Tenors performed there in 2003.

His Las Vegas production at the 5,000-seat Resorts World theater was announced in December 2021 and limited to only six performances from April 27 through May 7. Grosses from both weekends of shows reached $4.64 million during the run produced by AEG’s Concerts West.

Although it was his first residency in the city, he has played other Las Vegas engagements in previous years, beginning with sold out concerts at MGM Grand Garden Arena in 2007, 2010 and 2013. More recently, in 2019 during “An Evening with Michael Bublé,” he played to a sellout crowd of 14,183 at T-Mobile Arena on March 30, grossing $1.69 million.

Looking ahead on the “Higher” tour, Bublé is booked in Australia for three weeks late this year, while a European leg is planned for the first three months of 2023. s