Rogue One Sold Hundreds Of Thousands Of Tickets In Mere Minutes

CBR

By Brett White

Published Nov 28, 2016

A statement from Fandango gives an early indication of just how Rogue One fared in its first night of presales.

While official sales numbers have yet to be revealed, a new statement from Fandango sheds some light on the overnight presale figures for "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story." Within seconds of going on sale, many Fandango users started to experience time outs and issues as the website was flooded with requests to purchase tickets to the anthology Star Wars film. Fandango released a statement to the Los Angeles Times about "Rogue One's" performance in its initial hours on sale.

"Last night, Fandango saw extraordinary demand for tickets to ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,’" read the statement. "Within minutes of going on sale, we sold hundreds of thousands of tickets."

Following reports that the site had crashed or experienced delays, Fandango clarified what actually happened. "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.”

So we now know that, according to Fandango, "Rogue One" sold "hundreds of thousands of tickets" within just minutes of going on sale. Considering that movie tickets cost on average $8.73 and "Rogue One" had to have sold at least 200,000 tickets according to that statement, it's entirely possible that the film made $1.74 million in just a few moments last night. Of course that's just going off of Fandango's less-than-specific statement and no official numbers have been released yet.

Last year, “The Force Awakens” earned more than $50 million in advance ticket sales prior to the film ever even reaching theaters. The film broke all pre-sale records, besting the high bars set by “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Hunger Games” in previous years.

Set outside of the main sequel trilogy that began with “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “Rogue One” is set just before 1977’s “Star Wars” and details the Rebel plot to steal the Death Star plans from the Empire. Directed by Gareth Edwards (“Godzilla,” “Monsters”) from a script by Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz, “Rogue One” stars Felicity Jones, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Forest Whitaker, Diego Luna and Riz Ahmed.

“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” opens on December 16.