Six Records Star Wars is Certain to Break

December 8, 2015

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The Force Awakens opens in theaters in less than two weeks, and the hype is growing. In fact, it now looks like the film could break well over a dozen major records during its box office run, not including some of the more esoteric records, like biggest non-opening Wednesday (currently $29.07 million, and held by Transformers, in case you were wondering.) That’s a lot records to keep track of. So in the lead up to the launch, we will be looking at these possible records divided into three groups. Today, we are going to look at the records we think are the most likely to fall: the ones we think have a 90% chance or better of being broken by The Force Awakens. In fact, in some cases, they have already fallen.

Highest Pre-sales on IMAX
According to IMAX, no film has ever had IMAX pre-sales greater that $1 million. The Force Awakens had $6.5 million before November began.

Well, that was easy.

Highest Pre-sales
Again, already broken. It broke the record for opening day presales, opening week, and so on, but we are not going to divide the record into smaller bits. That would be cheating.

Single Day Box Office, December
This record is currently held by The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey at $37.13 million. This is far less than The Force Awakens’ ticket pre-sales and if this record doesn’t fall, something has gone terribly wrong.

Opening Weekend Box Office, December
This record is also currently held by The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey at $84.62 million. This is very likely less than The Force Awakens will have made in pre-sales by the time it opens, so if this record doesn't fall, hats will be eaten.

2015 Preview Evening Receipts
So far, the best preview numbers we’ve seen this year were pulled in by The Avengers: Age of Ultron with $27.6 million. The only way this record might not fall is if The Force Awakens opened in a limited number of theaters late on Thursday evening. Disney aren’t that stupid: from what we’ve seen, it’s opening at 7pm on Thursday in every theater. This record should fall by a mile.

Widest Opening
The current record is 4,468, held by The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Very early reports, have The Force Awakens opening in approximately 4,500 theaters. Granted, that number could be off by just 1% and Eclipse would keep the record, but Disney doesn’t seem to be holding the movie back. This one should fall too, if only by a small margin.

Those are the records we think the film has a 90% chance or better of breaking. Next time we will look at the records that are closer to a coin toss, while this time next week we will look at the hard-but-possible records.

- Star Wars: The Force Awakens
- Star Wars franchise history

Filed under: Record openings, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Star Wars Ep. VII: The Force Awakens, Star Wars