Boxoffice Insider: Dua Lipa Scores $40 Million In North America

Dua Lipa completed the opening leg of her 2022 world tour at the beginning of April after a seven-week trek through North America that brought in $40 million at the box office from 29 concerts at 28 arenas. Overall, her sold-ticket count reached 393,825, the third-highest total among all touring artists worldwide since the beginning of the year. Only Bad Bunny and Coldplay top that number – both with attendance totals over half a million.

The tour supports her second studio album Future Nostalgia, released in March 2020 on Warner Records. She originally planned to launch her tour that year, but like most artists with 2020 plans, multiple postponements followed due to the pandemic. Ultimately it debuted on the 9th of February at FTX Arena in Miami and remained in the U.S. and Canada until April 1, wrapping with a performance for 15,332 fans at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena.

Now the English pop star is back home in the U.K. and currently on the road with the second leg of the tour that began at Manchester’s AO Arena on April 15. It will stop in 17 European countries this year with shows set primarily on arena stages, although she will also appear at a handful of festivals including her final show at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark on June 30.

Among the 32 dates on the tour’s European itinerary, two-show engagements are booked on consecutive nights in five cities. Two of them occur during her opening stretch through the U.K. and Ireland at Dublin’s 3Arena and The O2 in London. Our box-office archives include past appearances in both of those cities, although most of her earlier headlining dates were booked in smaller venues.

During her 2018 tour, she performed in Dublin at Olympia Theatre (now named 3Olympia Theatre), selling out two shows on April 9-10 with 3,166 fans in attendance over both nights. Then, during the same month, she headlined on the 20th at London’s Alexandra Palace for a hometown crowd of 9,753. However, her best attendance among the shows she performed that month was recorded at The SSE Hydro in Glasgow (now known as The OVO Hydro). The ticket total at the arena was 12,658 for a gross of £316,585 ($443,485 USD). The archives also include an earlier Glasgow date from 2017 where she sold out the O2 Academy with 2,477 tickets moved on Oct. 11 of that year. 

Although the two upcoming shows in May at The O2 will mark her first solo headlining concerts at the arena, she appeared there in 2016 as part of the lineup for the Capital FM Jingle Bell Ball, which drew 26,246 attendees for a $2.3 million gross, Dec. 3-4. Also in London, her previous performances include an appearance with Martin Garrix at the British Summer Time Festival in Hyde Park on July 2, 2017.

On the earlier North American leg of this year’s tour, every concert was sold out including a two-night stint in the Los Angeles market, the only multiple show engagement on the schedule. She played the KIA Forum at Inglewood on March 22-23 and racked up a gross of $3,228,153, her largest gross ever as a solo headliner, according to the Pollstar Boxoffice archives. She sold 30,270 seats at the arena during the Live Nation-produced engagement with tickets priced from $44.50 to $164.50.

New York City’s Madison Square Garden logged the largest gross for a single performance, scoring a $2.05 million box-office take from 15,461 sold tickets on March 1 – due in part to a top ticket price of $193.50, which was the highest at any venue on the North American jaunt. The best attendance for one concert, though, was recorded at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., on the next night. She performed for 16,068 fans at the venue, earning a gross of $1.65 million.

Looking past the European leg of the “Future Nostalgia” tour, Lipa will head to Canada in July for shows in Montreal and Toronto, followed by a September Latin American leg. Then, the tour will wrap with a five-city stretch through Australia in November.