Not even Yoda could have foreseen the perfect storm of factors that have led “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” into its own orbit at the box office.
The seventh installment of the sci-fi drama continues to crush box office records, earning $49.3 million on Christmas Day, double the holiday’s previous champ, 2009’s “Sherlock Holmes” ($24.6 million). The next closest film, the Will Ferrell comedy, “Daddy’s Home,” earned $15.7 million in its opening day Friday.
“It's not just a movie anymore, it's a cultural event, it's part of the zeitgeist,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior box office analyst for Rentrak.
Already having notched $890.3 million globally, the film will become the fastest film in history to cross $1 billion worldwide sometime this weekend. Once considered unthinkable, the film now has a good shot at surpassing the $2.8 billion all-time box office No. 1 “Avatar.” Consider that the Force has yet to be awakened in China, the second biggest movie market in the world, where “Star Wars” will open on Jan. 9.
That sort of money, however, doesn’t just drop out of the sky like an armada of TIE fighters. There have been a number of advantages that have benefited the film:
• Notoriously secretive director J.J. Abrams has created the impression that the movie is so full of spoilers that no one can wait for on demand or DVD viewing.
“It's been about creating a mystique and a mystery around the movie that makes audiences want to go out and see it before it's spoiled for them,” says Dergarabedian.
David James/AP
Fans have been racing to see ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ in theaters in record numbers.
• Can Jedi manipulate the weather? Because unseasonably warm temperatures in the Northeast have made it easy for movie-goers to leave their homes and head to theaters.
• Disney fanned interest in the youngest of movie-goers by releasing the movie in a holiday season where cool, brand new toys have been on the shelves of stores for weeks. By the time the movie opened, a lot of kids had already asked for remote-controlled BB-8s for Christmas.
“A whole new generation will be talking about this with the same kind of excitement, enthusiasm and nostalgia as older movie goers do about the original (1977 ‘Star Wars’),” says Dergarabedian.