After long lines online last night, advance movie ticket retailers are reporting a robust day for Disney’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which hits theaters on the night of Dec. 15.
Since becoming available 24 hours ago on Movietickets.com, Rogue One has dominated 76% of the site’s sales, with Moana now trailing at 5%.
Meanwhile, over at Fandango, the company reports “extraordinary demand for tickets to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Within minutes of going on sale, we sold hundreds of thousands of tickets.”
Reports in the media have stated that Fandango crashed due to the demand, requiring wait times of 20-30 minutes. Technically speaking, the site never ever crashed.
Fandango’s report continued, “Similar to ticketing for a highly popular concert event, a ‘waiting room’ in the checkout process was established to accommodate customers as quickly as possible. We were able to continuously serve a record number of customers throughout the night, despite some intermittent slowdowns — and in order to meet the incredible consumer demand, our exhibition partners continue to add new showtimes for opening weekend.”
Buzz is that Disney insiders are giddy about the results, with a number of folks in exhibition surprised at the high sales. No word yet about Rogue One breaking Force Awakens records, however, that was never expected to happen. The J.J. Abrams-directed Episode VII set the bar rather high: it had been 10 years since the last Star Wars movie, and 32 years since Return of the Jedi. Force Awakens’ first day sales last October set a record for both Imax ($6.5M) and Movietickets’ which saw its best first day ever with 95% tickets sold. Ultimately, Force Awakens was the best advance seller for Fandango, and in total generated $100M (in all advance sales) before the title even opened to its all-time record of $247.96M over Dec. 18-20 last year.
Tracking has Rogue One opening between $100M-$140M stateside, which would make it the second best December debut after Force Awakens.