
‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ has smashed box office records around the globe, raking in an estimated $517 million on opening.
Within the first four days, the seventh film in the blockbuster franchise – which was sold to Walt Disney for by Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012 – reached a staggering ÂŁ32.8 million in the UK breaking ‘Jurassic World’s’ record for the highest grossing four-day-opening weekend of all time.
And in the US, the film – which stars the likes of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill and is directed by J.J. Abrams – has taken an impressive $238 million domestically and $279 million internationally, bringing the weekend global box office takings to an astounding total of $517 million.
In the UK and Ireland, the movie – which also stars John Boyega and Daisy Ridley – beat the two current leading three-day-openers, ‘Skyfall’ and ‘Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows 2’ at this stage in release whilst also overtaking the entire lifetime totals of the first ‘Hunger Games’ film, ‘Amazing Spider-Man 2’, ‘Prometheus’, ‘The Martian’, ‘Transformer’ and ‘Fast & Furious 6’.
The next effort to top the box office will be in China, where the film will be released on January 9.
China is the world’s second-largest movie market and the last ‘Star Wars’ movie only made $9 million there in 2005, according to the Guardian newspaper.
The current highest-grossing movie of all time is ‘Avatar’, which raked in $2.8 billion in global sales.