![]() ![]() ![]() I don’t know whether Disney and/or Lucasfilm saw The Force Awakens’ $2.068 billion global gross as potentially par for the course for the franchise. The movie itself, a 32-years-later direct sequel to Return of the Jedi featuring Ford’s Han Solo, Fisher’s Leia Organa and Hamill’s Luke Skywalker in their marquee roles, did the rest. The Christmas release, which put its second and third Fridays right on Christmas and New Year’s Day, along with a commercially underwhelming Pixar flick ( The Good Dinosaur), a slightly disappointing Hunger Games finale ( Mockingjay Part II) and no kid-targeted biggies until Zootopia in March of 2016 set the table. But if you remove reissues from the totals, it leapfrogs past Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Exorcist and Star Wars to be the eight-biggest “original release” grosser of all time (behind Doctor Zhivago, Jaws, The Ten Commandments, Titanic, E.T., The Sound of Music and Gone with the Wind).Īll this “fun with math” emphasizes something I’ve been arguing for years, which is that The Force Awakens was such a once-in-a-generation mega-smash, especially in North America, that the idea of replicating its success (or expecting its sequels and spin-offs to do so) was a fool’s errand. The Force Awakens is currently listed as 11th among “tickets sold/adjusted for inflation” domestic earners. That’s not a record, as Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs earned $66.6 million of its $185 million domestic cume via that initial 1937 release, but it caught my attention. Random digression, but Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope earned $460 million domestic between 19, with 53% of its domestic total via reissues and rereleases. ![]()
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