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Staged by Julie Taymor to music by Bono and The Edge, this New York production holds the record for the most expensive show in Broadway history: around 75 million dollars, serious injuries among the performers, and a final curtain in early 2014. Here is the full breakdown of how it all unravelled.
Spider-Man has been through a lot in his career: an alien black suit, having his body stolen by Doctor Octopus, his own death, and a career as a cannibal zombie across the multiverse. But none of those fictional disasters comes close to what happened to the web-slinger in real life between 2010 and 2014: his Broadway musical, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. A project that cost 75 million dollars (the most expensive in Broadway history), caused 9 serious on-stage accidents, and got a legend of American theatre sacked. It is arguably the biggest industrial catastrophe in the modern history of live performance — and hardly anyone tells the story in full.
This article retraces the whole Turn Off the Dark saga, from the hugely ambitious initial project to its closure in January 2014. Scored by Bono and The Edge of U2, directed by Julie Taymor (the director behind Broadway's The Lion King), produced on a record budget with stage effects unprecedented in the history of theatre, the musical should have been Marvel's triumph on stage. Instead, it became a legendary nightmare whose backstage story is every bit as gripping as Peter Parker's darkest comics.
The Ambitious Project: Julie Taymor Wants to Reinvent Spider-Man
The story begins in 2002 when Julie Taymor, freshly celebrated for her revolutionary staging of The Lion King on Broadway (which had been playing to sold-out houses for 5 years by then), is approached by Marvel and Sony to adapt Spider-Man for musical theatre. The project is enormous from the outset: Taymor wants to create a show that combines theatre, aerial circus, digital projections and pyrotechnic performances. She pictures Spider-Man literally flying above the audience, right across the auditorium, on a rigging system never seen before on Broadway.
Taymor's narrative vision is every bit as bold as her staging. She invents a new character and places her at the heart of the show: Arachne, a Greek spider-goddess said to have inspired Spider-Man's powers. This mythological creature, a conceptual descendant of characters such as Shathra in the comics, becomes Peter Parker's mystical guide and antagonist. It is a radical creative choice that pulls the show away from the classic Spider-Man comics, and it will be one of the main sources of the disaster to come.
The initial budget is announced at 35 million dollars in 2007 — already colossal for Broadway. As the production takes shape and the technical complications explode, that budget more than doubles to reach 75 million dollars in 2011, making Turn Off the Dark the most expensive Broadway show of all time. For comparison, the previous record (Shrek The Musical in 2008) stood at 25 million. Spider-Man tripled it the moment it opened.
The Music of Bono and The Edge: The Trump Card That Was Meant to Save Everything
The show's central commercial argument was the music. Marvel and Sony hand the songwriting to Bono and The Edge, the two main members of rock band U2 — one of the biggest bands in the world at the time. Bono himself has been an absolute Spider-Man fan since childhood, and he takes the project on to explore a new dimension of his art. With The Edge, he writes 28 original songs for the show, blending U2's trademark arena rock with dramatic ballads tailored to musical theatre.
On paper, it is the perfect alignment: music from a legendary band, staging by an Oscar-winning director, and Marvel's most popular source material. The songs 'Rise Above' (the show's signature number, later released as a Reeve Carney single in 2011) and 'Boy Falls from the Sky' are genuinely well written and well sung by talented actors. But the problem is that music alone cannot carry a show whose staging, script and physical safety for the cast are fundamentally broken.
Reeve Carney, cast as Peter Parker, delivers vocals that win real acclaim — including in the rare scenes where the show works narratively. Jennifer Damiano plays Mary Jane with a much-noticed stage presence, and Patrick Page is unanimously praised for his theatrical Green Goblin, widely considered one of the best things in the whole show. The cast do their job. The problem lies in everything around them.
The 9 Accidents That Made Broadway History
This is where Turn Off the Dark goes from 'ambitious show with problems' to 'American national scandal'. The stage effects dreamed up by Julie Taymor — Spider-Man flying above the audience on wires, spectacular leaps from the balcony, several characters flying at once — are technically unprecedented in their complexity. The performers wear industrial harnesses and are launched at high speed along precise trajectories. When something goes wrong, it goes very wrong.
The first serious accident happens during technical rehearsals in September 2010: Kevin Aubin, an aerial understudy, breaks both wrists landing badly after a flight. A few weeks later, Natalie Mendoza (the actress playing Arachne) suffers a severe concussion after a scenery cable strikes her squarely on the head. But the worst is still to come.
On 20 December 2010, in the middle of a paid preview performance, Christopher Tierney — Spider-Man's understudy — falls more than 9 metres during a flying sequence. His harness had not been properly secured. He fractures his skull, several ribs and cervical vertebrae. In front of a panicking audience, paramedics stretcher the actor out. The incident makes front pages around the world the next day and triggers an investigation by OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), the American workplace safety body. The show is suspended for several days.
In total, 9 serious accidents are documented across the previews and performances of Turn Off the Dark — an absolute record for Broadway. Injured performers follow one after another: Brandon Rubendall, T.J. Mayer (a fracture after a fall), Daniel Curry (a leg trapped in the machinery mid-show in 2013), and several others. Each incident reignites the safety controversy, forces technical modifications, and pushes the project's total cost up again.
Julie Taymor's Departure and the Complete Rewrite
Beyond the accidents, Turn Off the Dark suffers from a structural narrative problem. Taymor's script, built around the character of Arachne and her Greek mythological themes, completely baffles audiences and critics alike. The first previews in November 2010 draw devastating reactions. Specialist press critics — who normally wait until after the official opening — exceptionally decide to publish their verdicts during the previews, breaking a Broadway taboo. The New York Times calls the show 'a failure that would make you laugh and cry at the same time'. Variety is more brutal still: 'the greatest artistic and financial disaster Broadway has seen in fifty years'.
Under pressure from panicking producers and investors, Julie Taymor is removed from her post in March 2011. A new writer, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (who would later become famous as showrunner of Riverdale and Sabrina), is brought in to rewrite the show from top to bottom. He cuts almost all of the Arachne character, refocuses the story on Peter Parker and Mary Jane, simplifies the storytelling, and works with the co-directors to make the show more accessible and more faithful to the comics.
The rewrite takes three months, during which the show carries on playing in previews (at a cost of some 1.3 million dollars a week in losses). It is the longest preview period in the whole history of Broadway: 182 performances before the official opening. The previous record was fewer than 50. That statistical anomaly alone shows the scale of the disaster.
The Official Opening in June 2011: The Final Verdict
On 14 June 2011, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark officially opens after more than 6 months of previews and a complete rewrite. The critical reception is mixed but noticeably better than before: reviewers praise Aguirre-Sacasa's narrative improvements, Patrick Page's performance as the Green Goblin, and the music by Bono and The Edge. But they remain unconvinced by the stage effects (still a source of delays and technical difficulties) and by the show's overall coherence.
Commercially, and paradoxically, the show performs better than anyone predicted. Morbid curiosity draws tourists from all over the world — going to see 'the disastrous Spider-Man musical' becomes a tourist attraction in its own right, on a par with visiting the Statue of Liberty or going up the Empire State. For 2 years, Turn Off the Dark plays to around 70-80% capacity, taking more than 1 million dollars a week at the box office.
But that relative commercial success does not cover the show's gigantic running costs. With 75 million dollars of initial investment, stage effects requiring a technical crew of 50-plus, and constant maintenance costs, Turn Off the Dark loses money almost every week of its existence. Final losses are estimated at between 60 and 65 million dollars over the 4 years it ran — the biggest financial loss in Broadway history.
The Closure in January 2014 and the Final Reckoning
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark closes for good on 4 January 2014, after 1,066 official performances plus the 182 previews. In pure longevity terms that is technically a respectable score (3 years of shows), but the financial figures tell a different story. According to several sources, the main investors (Michael Cohl, Jeremiah Harris and their consortium) lose 60-plus million dollars of their own money. The producers announce their intention to mount a new version on a world tour or in Las Vegas, but none of those plans ever materialises.
The cultural legacy of Turn Off the Dark is fascinating. On one hand, it is a textbook case in every production-management and theatre school — how NOT to run a big-budget creative project, how NOT to underestimate technical complexity, how NOT to build a script so disconnected from its source material. On the other, it has become a cult object for hardcore Spider-Man fans — something so bizarre and so expensive that it becomes fascinating in hindsight.
For fans who never saw the show, several documentaries and YouTube videos are circulating. The Wall Street Journal released a feature-length documentary in 2017 ('Glass Onion: The True Story of Spider-Man's Broadway Disaster') that retraces the whole story with exclusive interviews. The songs by Bono and The Edge are available on the streaming platforms and still hold up today — particularly 'Rise Above' and 'Boy Falls from the Sky'.
Why Adapting Spider-Man for the Stage Remains So Difficult
The Turn Off the Dark experience reveals something profound about Spider-Man as a character. On screen, animation and digital effects make it possible to render the web-slinger's aerial acrobatics with a fluidity live theatre simply cannot reproduce. When Sam Raimi films Tobey Maguire swinging between the buildings in Spider-Man 2, he uses a combination of stunts, doubles, practical effects and CGI. It is dangerous but controlled. On Broadway, doing the same thing live, 8 times a week, in front of 1,500 spectators, with no visible safety nets — that is asking the impossible of human performers.
Spider-Man as a character is also narratively complex in a way that is hard to adapt to the musical theatre format. Musical theatre favours simple, powerful emotional arcs — love, loss, the search for identity. Spider-Man combines all of that with a sprawling mythology that takes in Venom and the symbiote, the Spider-Verse multiverse, the Sinister Six, and dozens of other supporting characters. Compressing all of that into 2 hours 30 of live performance while keeping the emotional depth is a near-impossible challenge.
Julie Taymor's decision to introduce the character of Arachne and reinvent the mythology was probably an attempt to simplify that complexity — to create a new theatrical narrative rather than adapt the comics directly. But the choice pushed the show away from what Spider-Man fans wanted to see, and it did not win over musical theatre lovers unfamiliar with the source material either. The show ended up falling between two stools, fully pleasing nobody.
The Legacy: Why Turn Off the Dark Is Still Fascinating in 2026
More than ten years after the show closed, Turn Off the Dark still fascinates Spider-Man fans and Broadway lovers alike. Why? Because it is a uniquely hybrid object: an industrial catastrophe, a wildly ambitious creative swing, an accident of cultural history, and an extraordinary human experience for every actor and technician involved. Reeve Carney still talks about it regularly in podcast interviews, describing it as both the hardest and the most formative project of his career.
For fans who want to dig deeper into Spider-Man mythology beyond the stage, the films and the comics, the Marvel ecosystem today offers unprecedented riches. The complete page on Peter Parker covers every biographical angle of the character. The Spider-Verse pillar page explores the parallel dimensions. And the villains pillar page digs into the ecosystem of his antagonists — with a wry nod to the fact that Patrick Page remains, to this day, one of the finest Green Goblins ever performed across all media, despite the disaster unfolding around his role.
Turn Off the Dark is not just a catastrophe — it is also a warning and a lesson for every future superhero adaptation for the musical stage. No comparable project has been attempted since. When you have burned through 75 million dollars and nearly killed several performers trying to make Spider-Man fly over an audience, you naturally hesitate to try again. Broadway may have lost its appetite for risks on that scale ever since. For fans who love improbable stories and dramatic show-business backstage tales, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will remain the greatest artistic and industrial catastrophe of modern Broadway — and that is precisely what makes it unforgettable.
