The four-wall deal

What a four-wall is

The name is the whole description: you get the four walls. The renter pays a fixed rental fee, brings their own production and marketing, sells the tickets and keeps what they gross. The venue gets its fee whether ten people come or a thousand, and usually keeps the things that were always the building’s — the bar, the facility fee, sometimes the parking.

Showforma builds a four-wall as a forced door deal at 100%. There is no guarantee, because the venue is not guaranteeing anybody anything. There is a rental fee, which is a field on the record because it is money one party pays the other, and the person reading the document is the person paying it.

NGBOR            =  gross − facility fee − tax − ticket fees
renter keeps     =  NGBOR × 100%                      (a door deal: no guarantee, ever)
renter's net     =  NGBOR − rental fee − renter's own expenses
house receives   =  rental fee  (+ what the building keeps: bar, facility fee)

Why the box office belongs to the renter

In a promoted show the promoter carries the risk, so the promoter owns the box office and pays the artist out of it. A four-wall inverts that. The renter has already carried the risk — the fee is paid, the production is paid, before a ticket sells — so the ticket revenue is theirs, and the building’s claim on it is the fee it already charged. A four-wall in which the house also takes a percentage of the door is not a four-wall; it is a co-promotion with a rental fee in it, and it should be written as one.

This matters at settlement. A door deal has a contract floor of zero: nothing is owed to the renter whatever the house does, so a walk-out cap on a four-wall is measured against nothing, not against a guarantee that was never there. Read a stale guarantee as the floor and the cap pays out the wrong number.

A worked example

Room                  800 capacity · 650 sold at $30.00
Gross                 650 × $30.00                 =  $19,500.00
Facility fee          $2.00 × 650                  −   $1,300.00   (the building's)
After facility                                     =  $18,200.00
Tax (4%, inclusive)   $18,200 × 4 ÷ 104            −     $700.00
After tax                                          =  $17,500.00
Ticket fee            $1.50 × 650                  −     $975.00   (the ticketer's)
NGBOR                                              =  $16,525.00

Renter keeps          100% of the door             =  $16,525.00
Rental fee                                         −   $8,000.00
Renter's production                                −   $4,500.00
Renter's net                                       =   $4,025.00

House receives        rental fee $8,000 + facility fee $1,300 (+ the bar)

The renter’s break-even is the rental fee plus their own costs — $12,500 — against a net of $25.42 a ticket: 492 tickets, or 61.5% of the room. The house broke even the moment the fee cleared.

Net per ticket   $30.00 − $2.00 = $28.00 → less 4 ÷ 104 tax = $26.92 → less $1.50 = $25.42
491 sold         NGBOR $12,482.73    short by $17.27
492 sold         NGBOR $12,508.15    clear by  $8.15

What to put on the paper

• The rental fee, and what it includes. The rental offer in Showforma has a section called exactly that, because “the room” means different things in different buildings.
• Who keeps the facility fee, the bar and the merch. The example above assumes the building keeps the first two.
• Who holds the ticketing contract. The fees above are the house’s ticketer; a renter bringing their own changes the waterfall.
• Settlement timing. The renter is owed the door, and when is a term.