Seventh film in science fiction series still has a long way to go to beat Avatar in becoming highest grossing film of all time
The latest instalment of Star Wars has opened in cinemas across China, where its unpredictable popularity looks set to undermine expectations it would become the highest grossing film of all time.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh film in the science-fiction series, has already broken several box office records in north America. Three weeks after its initial release, it is the highest-grossing film in US history.
Star Wars premieres in China four decades late
Internationally, however, it still has a long way to go to beat Avatar, James Cameron’s sci-fi offering that features the attempted colonisation of another world. The international box office of the latest Star Wars movie stands at $1.6bn (£1.1bn), compared with the $2.8bn Avatar made in 2009.
Richard Huang, an analyst at Nomura Securities, expects the movie to roughly match the $229m in Chinese box-office sales that Jurassic World generated last year.
Huang said not many Chinese people were familiar with Star Wars. The franchise’s three prequel films released from 1999 to 2005 were shown in China, but at a time when there were far fewer screens in the country.
Disney organised a series of promotional events in the months leading up to the release, included the placing of 500 stormtrooper figures on the steps of the Great Wall and the illumination of the movie’s Chinese title on the guard towers for a light show in October.
It enlisted the marketing power of actor and singer Lu Han, who appeared in promotional videos and released a music video on Thursday called The Inner Force with images from the film.
The Hong Kong martial arts actor Donnie Yen and the Chinese actor and director Jiang Wen have been cast in the next Star Wars film, in a bid to appeal to Chinese audiences.