Tut exhibit eyes record for visitors

With its long run in Philadelphia, Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Franklin Institute is "on pace" to break the U.S. traveling-exhibition attendance record for a single city, the Franklin says.

The show has sold 1.18 million tickets - 1.13 million of which have been used - and has a month to go in its eight-month Philadelphia visit, prompting museum officials to predict yesterday that it will break the previous record of 1.3 million visitors set in 1977 when Treasures of Tutankhamun visited the Field Museum in Chicago.

That would mean the museum would host 195,000 visitors more between now and the end of the show's run here Sept. 30.

"I think we can do it," said Karen Corbin, the museum's marketing chief. "In August we had 166,390, and I am assuming we'll do better in September because people are actually in the city."

Corbin said September meant the resumption late in the month of an important attendance-driver - school groups.

For the show's final weekend in Philadelphia, the Franklin Institute will keep Tut open 24 hours a day. The exhibition also visited Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Chicago, though for shorter stays.

Selling tickets and realizing visitors are two different things, which explains the actual 50,000 fewer visitors than tickets sold.

To parse the numbers another way, the Franklin says that average daily visitorship to Tut is 5,400. Other U.S. exhibitions - traveling or not - have had average daily totals in excess of that number, including most recently the Edvard Munch show at the Museum of Modern Art and, by a hair, Tut's visit to Fort Lauderdale.

The term traveling exhibit can encompass everything from the preserved cadavers of "Body Worlds" to the masterworks of Picasso to the gleaming relics of ancient Egypt.

The robust numbers also mean some additional revenue for the Franklin and its partners, National Geographic, Arts and Exhibitions International, and AEG Exhibitions (with cooperation from the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities).

"It was quite a risky exhibition to bring, expensive and risky because of the insurance and the deal with Egypt," Corbin said. "But I think that people will be willing to try these complex kinds of arrangements again since it was so successful."

The show runs through Sept. 30. Tickets range from $17.50 to $32.50. See more at the Franklin Institute's Web site via http://go.philly.com/tutshow, or call 1-877-TUT-TKTS.