METALLICA has landed at position No. 1 on Billboard's "Hot Tours" list of top-grossing tours with $49.5 million in ticket sales from the first ten of the shows of the North American "WorldWired" tour that occurred during May and June. 464,988 tickets were sold during the first two months of the run, with Denver's NFL stadium, Sports Authority Field at Mile High, scoring the highest counts in both gross and attendance. A crowd of 51,955 fans attended the event that racked up $5.8 million in sales. Four other NFL stadiums during the first half of the summertime trek also topped the $5 million mark in sales for a single performance: Philadelphia's Lincoln Financial Field ($5.4 million) on May 12, MetLife Stadium ($5.1 million) in the New York City market on May 14, the Boston-area Gillette Stadium ($5.7 million) on May 19, and Chicago's Soldier Field ($5.3 million) on June 18. Sales from METALLICA's July and August concerts during the second half of the "WorldWired" summer trek will be reported at a later date. METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich told Rolling Stone that the band was genuinely surprised to learn they could still play stadiums, saying, "It was like, 'Holy fuck, people really still care about this band in ways that you stopped taking for granted literally decades ago. It was very inspiring and kind of eye-opening." He added: "Full stadium runs can sometimes be a little intimidating. There's all these things to worry about like, 'You should really try to play maybe only on the weekend,' and, 'Where do you play on Tuesday?' and some of those practicalities can get a little bewildering. We just threw caution to the wind. Doing a stadium run seemed like the perfect thing on the back of how well this record has been received and all the good will that's out there in METALLICA's world right now." The first European leg of METALLICA's "WorldWired" tour kicks off on September 2 in Copenhagen, Denmark and stretches through November. After a break, the trek will pick up again on February 1, 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, and continue through May, finishing up in Helsinki, Finland. The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame band is touring in support of its tenth studio album, "Hardwired... To Self-Destruct", which came out last November.
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