Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. The Star Wars: The Force Awakens juggernaut can not be stopped, it seems. Disney has a ton of money invested in this new trilogy launch being successful and so far the marketing has been on point. There have been bad leaks, but they didn't really spread outside of the hyper geek circles. All I know is there's a hush that goes over the crowd when I see a regular movie and the Force Awakens trailer plays.
People are ready for this one and Disney's making damn sure they can see it in the best possible (and most expensive) way. Namely, they're taking over every large format IMAX theater in North America (and the majority of those theaters internationally) for a guaranteed 4 weeks, per THR.
What that means is that the real good big screens are guaranteed to be Star Wars from December 18th-January 18th, which might be bad news for Ron Howard's In the Heart of the Sea and, possibly, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's The Revenant.
Since the article specified "large format theaters" I expect that opens up some Lie-Max screens (the slightly bigger than average screens at your local mall theater that they get to call IMAX for some reason) for other films, but come on. Unless there's a massive surprise in store we all know Star Wars will be raking in money this holiday season. Even those gunshy from the prequels are curious enough to be there opening weekend and if the movie ends up as good as we've been hearing it is it's going to be a repeater.
It's not a question of if Star Wars is going to be a success at the box office, it's a question of how massive of a success it'll be. Since they now get to add in every single IMAX's significantly higher ticket price to their total they stand a great chance of breaking records.
But all that's interesting to the bean counters. What that means for us lowly movie fans is that we'll get to see this movie on the biggest, brightest, loudest screens in the country. We'll also get to see that Jakku sequence that was filmed with IMAX cameras actually play in IMAX. Exciting, no?
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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