![]() It didn’t help that Rogue One reshoots, spearheaded by Tony Gilroy allegedly to make the grim heist melodrama more like Force Awakens, seemingly worked ($532 million domestic and $1.056 billion) worldwide). They had to know that Star Wars VII was a unique event, right? Had Force Awakens merely been an Avengers or Jurassic World-level mega-smash, and maybe had Rogue One “only” earned Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them or Batman v Superman-level grosses (over/under $850 million worldwide), then perhaps Rian Johnson’s acclaimed but (allegedly) divisive The Last Jedi wouldn’t have been on the defensive for “only” selling as many tickets as Empire Strikes Back in its initial theatrical run and only grossing about as much worldwide ($1.333 billion) as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II ($1.342 billion) Black Panther ($1.344 billion). ![]() 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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