‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ has record $57M opening night

And the Star Wars $100 million is the first triple-digit million-day ever.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens made $57m (£38m) on Thursday night, beating the previous record of $43.5m held by Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 2 in 2011. “In addition to that quartet, “The Force Awakens” set opening day records in Australia, Brazil, New Zealand, Belgium, Finland, Netherlands, Switzerland (French-speaking), Austria, Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, Iceland, Serbia, Chile and Peru”. Stay tuned for more details!!!

Box office analysts expect it to make around $200m (£134m) over its opening weekend, a total that could challenge the record Jurassic World set earlier this year.

The film, which carries a production cost of at least $200 million, opened in 32 additional foreign markets Thursday will open in most other markets Friday.

Elizabeth Frank, AMC, Chief Content and Programming Officer, says: “You can’t get any broader than this movie when it comes to audience appeal, and this weekend and beyond AMC will offer consumers the opportunity to enjoy STAR WARS however they would like – evening, midnight or morning, IMAX, Dolby Cinema, 2D or 3D, big cities and small towns, even corporate events and children’s birthday parties”.

3-D screening accounted for 47% of the night’s grosses on Thursday.

Directed by JJ Abrams, Star Wars: The Force Awakens returns to “a galaxy far, far away” some 30 years on from the action of 1983’s Return of the Jedi.

Such a positive reaction for “The Force Awakens” may attract the kind of repeat viewings that made James Cameron’s “Avatar” and “Titanic” the highest grossing films of all time. Greenfield said the success of “Force Awakens” would not offset the impact of subscriber losses at ESPN. Whether “The Force Awakens” can come close to the global hauls of those films ($2.8 billion for “Avatar” and $2.2 billion for “Titanic”) won’t be clear for weeks.

The White House showed its geek side and hosted a Star Wars screening.

“Okay everybody, I gotta get to Star Wars”, Obama said, leaving behind a White House press corps filled with questions.