Thanks to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Disney’s 2012 purchase of Lucasfilm for $4 billion is starting to look like a bargain. Not even two weeks after its release, the latest addition to the Star Wars canon has already amassed more than $1 billion in global box office receipts, setting yet another record in the process.
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According to Disney, Star Wars: The Force Awakens passed the $1 billion threshold just 12 days after its debut, besting the previous record of 13 days which was held by Jurassic World. All the more impressive is that Star Wars: The Force Awakens managed to set this record before the film even premiered in China, the world’s second largest movie market.
As we noted last week, the new Star Wars film has been on an absolute record-breaking tear since its release. Not only did it set a new global record for a weekend launch with $529 million in box office receipts, the film also holds the record for the biggest single day debut ($120.5 million) along with the records for the fastest film to reach both $100 million, $200 million, and now $1 billion in ticket sales.
Looking ahead, some are already anticipating that the film will eventually eclipse Avatar as the most successful film, in terms of domestic box office receipts, of all time.
Force Awakens has topped the two largest weekends of all-time and next weekend the only added competition is the expansion of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. Avatar’s domestic box office record of $760.5 million is very much in sight as Force Awakens is currently only $215.9 million shy of that number and has only been in domestic theaters for ten days. The question right now doesn’t necessarily seem to be a matter of “if”, but “when” followed by “How much?” A 3.5 times multiplier based on its opening weekend alone projects a $867.8 million domestic run… could it possibly go higher? A drop of 50% next weekend would still be enough to claim the largest third weekend of all-time as the stars seemed to be properly aligned for continued Star Wars box office glory.
Incidentally, the record for worldwide box office receipts is also held by Avatar, a figure which checks in at $2.78 billion.
