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Star Wars: The Force Awakens Expected To Earn $1.5 Billion

By Thomas Kuegler
Published on: 23:16 PST, Dec 12, 2015

The new Star Wars movie has come close to breaking the internet a few times, but is it ready to break box office records? LA Times reports that Star Wars:The Force Awakens is expected to earn anywhere from $1.5 to $2 billion dollars worldwide. The highest grossing film of all time was James Cameron’s Avatar, which made close to $2.8 billion.

The sheer expectations are enough to give director J.J. Abrams mini panic attacks.

J.J. recently said, “No. How can anything live up any expectation like that? But what it can do is, I think, introduce unbelievable actors turning incredible performances in a world that has visually the most incredible effects I’ve ever seen with music written by John Williams which breaks your heart and soars.”

“I’ve always felt like what George did and the first time it ever happened, there’s no way that I can imagine anything touching the magic of what he did and yet we all did the best we could to make that happen.”

With the impending release just five days away, Disney has slowly released little bits of footage to fans since the first teaser trailer last November. The short trailer introduced us to BB-8, Finn, and the return of the Millennium Falcon. Fans have since found out so much more.

Finn happens to be played by John Boyega, who’s just as excited as any about the release. Verge recently sat down with Boyega, and he opened up about the role.

“It was so intriguing about the role. I think for me, wearing the helmet and being part of the Stormtroopers felt so strange. Like, so this is what it feels like to just be one of the many. And to look the same, and to have to do the same thing. To be under the same orders. This is what it feels like. And I was actually quite shocked as to how much Finn’s journey is investigating [that idea]. He’s a fun character, he has a very complicated history, but we get to experience the individuality of Stormtroopers, and it’s never been done before.”

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is poised to give audiences a much different story than they’ve seen before, and Disney is hoping this new take on the popular universe is going to pay off. Many experts speculate that it will.

With sales of merchandise, movies, video games, and DVD’s tied to Star Wars, Disney could make up to $25 billion in the next five years alone. This is fitting because they bought it for just $4 billion a couple years ago. Some analysts actually thought that acquiring Lucasfilm was a bad move by Disney, but now the whole world is in a massive uproar about the next film, proving them unsurprisingly and definitively wrong.

“They will make back their investment in a relatively short period of time,” states an analyst at Edward Jones Research named Robin Diedrich. “Whether it is three or four years — you can see that being a pretty reasonable scenario.”

Disney CEO Bob Iger has been confident in the acquisition all along. “We know how to leverage or mine value from [intellectual property] probably better than any media company out there,” he said, “And we have the ecosystem to do it, worldwide.”

Now all that’s left is to find out how good the movie is. Harrison Ford recently saw the movie and told Good Morning America “It’s a wonderful movie, it’s got great production values. It’s a real big movie and I was delighted to see it.”

If you’re like me, you’ve already pre-purchased your tickets to see Star Wars preview on December 17, now all I have to do is wait and see if it lives up to the hype.

[Featured image via The Walt Disney Company]

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