Star Wars: The Force Awakens has a long, powerful hype train behind it. And with that hype train comes great expectations, as Deadline proves in a piece on analysts predicting it will make 2 billion freaking dollars at the box office. But is that being unreasonable?
Well, let’s crunch the numbers. As ridiculous as that number sounds, it’s not quite as big as you might think. In fact, $2 billion would only be good enough to bump Furious 7 out of the No. 3 slot on the list of highest-grossing movies. Well, currently; Jurassic World might make a pretty strong bid for No. 3 there. Either way, though, nobody is taking down Titanic or Avatar just yet.
Furthermore, Star Wars makes money in theaters, even when everybody hates it. Episode III‘s domestic gross of $380 million would be a number that would make studios weep with joy today, and it came out a decade ago. And this was after Episode II came out and collected the lowest gross of the prequels. Hey, mediocrity looks much better when you put it against god-awful, OK? Don’t judge us. The year 2005 was a different time.
So, essentially, short of a complete and total PR disaster on the order of Lucas refusing to look up dirty words before naming things, $2 billion seems like a reasonable estimate. Notice, however, that we’re not ruling that one out. We’ve got our reasons.
(Via Deadline)