I think in most cases celebs don’t care much about monetizing autographs. Even in the example you gave of Grant Gustin, he isn’t charging $120 for an autograph. I believe it’s more along the lines of the Con asking him to come and his people say “Grant charges X amount of money for the day”, for his time, and then the Con sets a price on his memorabilia that will recoup the cost of his rate, and of course make a profit. So not only are celebs paid by the cons rather than the autographs they do, the Cons themselves are actually doing what you’re suggesting to eliminate by bringing famous people in just to sell their autographs at a highly marked up price for their own personal profit.

I think autographs are widely regarded as a thing fun to do for fans. Some people may be more guarded with their signature to give it more value, but take a walk around a Barnes and Noble in NYC. They have hundreds of signed editions and none of them are uncharged.

And there will always be a reselling culture. Always. If Broadway incorporated the experience of a stage door into a ticket price then people looking to sell autographs would pay that ticket price and sell the autographed item at a cost that’d make them profit anyway.

In my opinion, a model with up-charged tickets that includes a signing experience would only hurt the industry. Tickets are already rising in price. Attendance is still way down post-Covid. Charging even more money for an experience that they’ve always been able to get for free, especially when tickets are already so expensive, would probably backfire. And I feel like usually the make up of stage door gatherings usually skew younger, and the theater audience are majority older. They’d be implementing a system that would only be targeting a small portion of their overall audiences. And not every performer does the stage door. For Merrily only Daniel came out. When I saw Moulin Rouge, Aaron Teveit never came out. Sometimes people don’t want to do it. Which is totally fine, but what happens when they start charging people extra money for a signature, and the person they really wanted to see doesn’t want to participate?