‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ explodes to $100 million for Friday record

Avert your eyes, 20th Century Fox executives. The $57 million is part of the Friday total. A $100 million day would best the previous one-day high of $91.1 million, set by “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”.

The Force is already setting a US record with “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” taking in $50 million to $55 million in opening Thursday-night shows, preliminary estimates showed.

Analysts say The Force Awakens opened on Thursday so would have to perform staggeringly well over the weekend to top the latest James Bond’s film’s £41.3m debut, which was calculated over seven days as it opened on a Monday.

Star Wars frenzy has swept the celeb world with anyone and everyone getting involved.

“There are literally millions of tickets available for this weekend, and exhibitors have a lot of flexibility in terms of capacity and increasing the number of shows based on demand”, said Dave Hollis, EVP of distribution at Disney. Disney’s carefully planned release of film trailers and information over several months also boosted sales, he said. The record is held by Avatar with $US2.8 billion. Disney said that 47 percent of the box office came from 3-D showings and $5.7 million from Imax screens.

Produced by Lucasfilm and Bad Robot, “The Force Awakens ” is set approximately 30 years after the events of 1983’s “Return of the Jedi“.

The film sees original trilogy stars Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher reprise their Han Solo and Princess Leia roles alongside younger franchise newcomers.

J.J. Abrams’ seventh chapter in George Lucas’s space saga arrived with the kind of hoopla and anticipation that few films have ever matched. The movie scored a 95 per cent positive rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.

As anyone who has seen the powerful final moments of Force Awakens can attest, the tiny rocky island of Skellig Michael – located off the west coats of Ireland, and inhabited only by seabirds – makes a ideal alien landscape: a attractive, otherworldly place, with a sense of being somehow out of time.