Star Wars: The Force Awakens Hits $1 Billion In Ticket Sales
By Ani Bundel
Star Wars: The Force Awakens demolishes yet more ticket sale records, hitting $1,000,000,000 in record time.
How many box office records can a movie demolish in two weeks time? Star Wars: The Force Awakens is apparently on track to find out. As of this morning, ticket sales for the first of the new trilogy hit $1 Billion in global ticket sales. (Yes that’s Billion with a B.)
Related: Star Wars: The Force Awakens Cast List
At this point, ticket sale estimates for the ten day run of The Force Awakens (that’s through Christmas Day) stands at $544.6 million, and that’s just here in the US. Add in the global box office, and the sales through Christmas day reach $890 million. Star Wars also broke the Christmas Day box office record while it was at it, with $49 million, which is double what the previous record holder made. (Sherlock Holmes, at $24 million.) Forbes notes that Star Wars earned $70 million in 11 days of IMAX ticket sales, which is more than Avatar managed in its first month.
Then add in Saturday and Sunday, where the movie took in a second weekend record of $153 million, give or take several hundred thousand. Across the not-so-Narrow-Seas, the movie’s grosses, when you include the weekend are reported at $546. That means in twelve days’ time–with the movie not yet open in China, the largest overseas market in existence–the movie’s ticket sales stand at $1.09 billion. China is the Number 2 movie market after the US, and it doesn’t open over there until January 9th.
Forecasts have the movie hitting $700 million domestic by the end of New Year’s Weekend, which means that the Avatar crown of all time domestic sales will be falling in a only a few days. The real question everyone is asking is if the sales will stay high enough to hit $1 billion domestically. If sales continue to beat predictions next weekend, chances are it very well could.