Demand for Star Wars: The Force Awakens tickets is sky(walker) high.
Imax (IMAX) entertainment, the Canadian theater company, has so far reported $6.5 million in U.S. and Canadian advance ticket sales, Deadline reports.
The figure crushes box office numbers set by other highly anticipated hit films. The Dark Knight Rises, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and The Avengers, for example, all raked in about $1 million each in such sales, Deadline notes.
Greg Foster, CEO of Imax, said the movie’s sales success is unprecedented. “The only words to describe the first day of Imax worldwide advance ticket sales for Star Wars: The Force Awakens are ‘record-shattering,'” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “We’re seeing sell-outs across the board – from Hollywood to London, to Sparks, Nevada, and everywhere in between.”
The J.J. Abrams-directed film is still two months from opening in theaters. The extended wait didn’t stop people from scrambling to purchase pre-sales tickets after viewing the latest trailer, which premiered during ESPN’s Monday Night Football game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the New York Giants on Monday. Disney (DIS) owns both Lucasfilm, the makers of the seventh Star Wars installment, as well as the ESPN sports network.
Two of the top ticketing sites in the U.S., Comcast-owned (CMCSA) Fandango as well as Movietickets.com, suffered outages due to overwhelming Internet traffic as a result of the high demand, Bloomberg reports. Fandango, AMC (AMC), and Movietickets.com all broke their previous records in first-day tickets pre-sales by selling eight times, 10 times, and three times as many tickets, respectively, for the new Star Wars film than their past best selling films.
At least one analyst has estimated that the film will rake in $2 billion globally.