Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a movie that doesn’t come out for another month, has already made over $50 million in ticket sales. That is, as the experts say, bananas. OK, the experts don’t really say that, but Variety reports that online ticket service Fandango has declared it “the biggest pre-seller” in the site’s history, beating out the first Hunger Games movie. The Hollywood Reporter expands that scope a little, saying that The Force Awakens has set the record for advance ticket sales overall—not just through Fandango—by doubling the record set by The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.
However, in an attempt to Debbie Downer this whole thing, both Variety and THR note that Disney and Lucasfilm now have to keep the expectations for the actual box office return in check, or else they could end up making slightly less money than they think they’ll make. Still, it’s going to rake in an absurd amount of money either way, with THR saying, “many believe Force Awakens will score the biggest North American debut of all time,” and some predictions going as high as $300 million. The Force Awakens opens on December 18, though, and some of these analysts point out that movies opening before Christmas don’t usually make a ton of money (the biggest December opening of all time is The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey with $85 million). Of course, that point seems to ignore the fact that this is Star Wars, and even the bad Star Wars movies made mountains of money.
As high as these figures are, it’s worth pointing out that Disney paid $4.05 billion for Lucasfilm back in 2012. Even if the movie pulls in that $300 million opening, there’s still a long way to go before it…aw, whatever. We can’t even pretend to keep that up. Assuming it hasn’t already made that money back from toy sales over the last few months, it’ll make it back in a heartbeat once these movies actually start coming out.