‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Breaks Record With $238 Million Debut

The record for biggest box office opening weekend ever belongs to Universal’s “Jurassic World” which premiered to $208.8 million just six months ago.

If final weekend numbers are even better, the film has a shot at matching or eclipsing “Jurassic World”, which garnered a whopping $524.9 million worldwide. By last Friday, worldwide ticket sales had reached US$129.5 million as the movie set opening-day records in Britain, Germany, Australia, Brazil and other countries.

It is also the first movie to cross $100 million in one day in North America.

The Rentrak weekend global box office figures are in and the first Star Wars film devoid of any input from George Lucas has taken US$517 million (RM2.2 billion).

After fielding questions, Obama concluded the press conference: “OK everybody, I got to get to ‘Star Wars'”.

The new Star Wars film also set a new opening night record in the USA and Canada. The Force Awakens had already broken single-day records with $57 million. It opened at #1 in all markets throughout the world with the exception of Korea and Vietnam, where it was the #1 western films. Disney bought Lucasfilm for US$4 billion in 2012 and spent more than US$200 million to produce The Force Awakens.

“All the materials that were released was a very carefully crafted plan of releasing very little on the film but enough to entice people”, he said.

According to social analysis by Amobee, on the films release there were almost 1.3 million tweets mentioning Star Wars with Twitter sentiment being 25 per cent Positive, 63 per cent Neutral, and 12 per cent Negative.

Many hard-core fans wanted to see the first new “Star Wars” movie in a decade, and the first featuring original stars such as Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in 32 years, as soon as possible.

As far as all-time box office sales, two films by James Cameron hold the record – Avatar ($2.78 billion) and Titanic ($2.18).

Audiences awarded an A rating in polling by survey firm CinemaScore, Disney said. However, “The Force Awakens” total does not include sales in China, where the movie won’t open until January 9.