The records continue to fall for Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, which just became the highest-grossing film of all time in U.S. theaters for Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
The Force Awakens has now earned more than $629 million domestically since its December 18 premiere, moving it past 2012’s superhero team-up blockbuster The Avengers to become the fourth highest-grossing film of all time in the U.S. The new ranking also makes it the most successful film of all time for Disney.
The meteoric rise of The Force Awakens is particularly notable, given that it took the film only 13 days to pass the total gross of The Avengers over its entire run in U.S. theaters. The Force Awakens finished the year as the second highest-grossing movie of 2015 domestically, ranking just behind the $652 million earned by Jurassic World — another total earned over the course of its entire run, far longer than the 13 days that Star Wars has been in theaters so far.
Internationally, The Force Awakens is currently the eighth highest-grossing film of all time with almost $1.3 billion in ticket sales so far. However, the film has yet to open in China, the second largest market in the world — meaning that it’s likely to get a big boost when it premieres in that country January 9. Currently, it ranks behind both The Avengers and its 2015 sequel, Avengers: Age of Ultron, in the all-time global box-office records. (A situation that will almost certainly change when it opens in China, if not before that point.)
In the race to become the highest-grossing movie of all time domestically and worldwide, The Force Awakens still has to beat the records set by James Cameron’s sci-fi adventure Avatar in both markets. The 2009 film holds both prestigious records with $760.5 million in U.S. theaters over the course of its 34-week run, and $2.78 billion worldwide. (Avatar and Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic are the only films to have ever crossed the $2 billion mark globally.)
Given that The Force Awakens is still going strong in theaters and has quite a bit of time left in what’s likely to be a long run, it will be interesting to see where the film ends up in 2016’s box-office rankings, and whether it will end up among the highest-grossing films for two consecutive years.
