Rogue One Is On Track for a Massive Opening Weekend

CBR

By Rob Cave

Published Nov 23, 2016

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is projected to make some serious money at the box office.

"Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" may be month away from hitting theaters, but the signs are already pointing towards its box office success. A recent article from The Hollywood Reporter projects that the film could make over $130 million+ in its opening weekend in North America alone.

However, the article also notes that, just as with political polls, there are a number of different projections available. Some predict the film's domestic opening weekend take could be as much as $150 million or as low $120 million.

Much of the difficulty around predicting "Rogue One's" ticket sales comes from the fact that, unlike the previous seven films in the "Star Wars" franchise, it stands outside of their existing framework of trilogies, with few returning characters from the previous movies to keep audiences engaged.

Few analysts expect "Rogue One" to perform as strongly as "The Force Awakens," which took in $248 million at its domestic opening before going on to gross $2.07 billion worldwide. At a recent investors conference, Walt Disney chairman Bob Iger reportedly said, "We've not ever felt ['Rogue One'] would do the level that "[The] Force Awakens" did, but we've been very, very encouraged that the level of interest in this is as high as it was for '[The] Force Awakens.'"

THR has also speculated that the film's box office take could be hurt by recent political tweets from the film's writer Chris Weitz, who described the Empire as "a white supremacist (human) organization." Conversely, it could be that a film that uses hope as its main theme and moves the action back to just before the the beginning of the original 1977 movie might recapture more of its sensational cinematic success.

Directed by Gareth Edwards from a script by Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” stars Felicity Jones, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Forest Whitaker, Diego Luna and Riz Ahmed and opens on December 15 in the UK and December 16 in North America.