Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ticket sales off to strong start

Advance ticket sellers say Rogue One is off to robust start, coming close to last year’s figures for The Force Awakens despite being the second Star Wars movie in a year.

In the past, films from the galaxy far, far away have been separated by three years at the minimum, but now that Lucasfilm is rolling out a new one annually, the question of oversaturation has been raised. Turns out, that’s not a problem.

MovieTickets.com says presales for the Dec. 16 release, which kicked off at midnight on Sunday evening, represent their biggest first day presales of the year. After only one day, tickets are running at 90 percent of day one presales for The Force Awakens. Given that Rogue One is following so soon after Episode VII‘s release and also features an entirely new cast of lead characters (except for Darth Vader, who is said to be more of a peripheral figure), a 10 percent drop seems negligible.

In the first day of sales, over 75 percent of all tickets purchased through MovieTickets.com were for the new Star Wars film, and unlike last year, there have been no reported outages due to crashed servers. IMAX reports that the movie is currently dominating its early sales as well.

Rogue One was also Fandango’s biggest first day of presales for 2016, and it has the second highest tally in the company’s history (following, again, The Force Awakens). Fandango reps tell EW the company “sold hundreds of thousands of tickets within the first few minutes” they went on sale.

The Force Awakens had a staggering $248 million opening weekend domestically last year and ended up earning more than $2 billion globally. Predictions for Rogue One’s North American first weekend are in the $130 million range. No dollar figures for presales have been released, but predictions may go up or down depending on how purchases shake out in the weeks to come before it arrives in theaters.

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