Star Wars ticket sales break records

Star Wars New Zealand pre-sales totaled more than $175,000 after just four hours. Photo Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images

Two months before its opening, the upcoming Star Wars movie is setting ticket sales records in the US and UK.

Bloomberg reported AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., the second-largest US cinema chain, has sold out more than 1000 screenings of the film ahead of The Force Awakens debut on December 18.

US online ticket seller Fandango smashed its previous record, selling eight times as many tickets as it did for The Hunger Games in 2012.

"Fandango traffic surged to 7 times its typical peak levels," the site said in a statement to Bloomberg this week. Enthusiasm for the film is expected "to continue all the way to its debut" it said.

In New Zealand pre-sales totaled more than $175,000 after just four hours when tickets went on sale on Tuesday. More sessions are being added to keep up with demand and it was the biggest flurry Kiwi cinemas had seen since Avatar in 2009.

Hoyts New Zealand general manager of operations Matthew Garelli said on Tuesday there had been a "good, steady" flow of traffic throughout the day.

In 2012 Disney spent $4 billion for franchise owner Lucasfilm Ltd., a decision that's looking smarter as its first Star Wars movie, the seventh installment in the series, approaches.

Bloomberg reported movie theatres are adding new show times, and researcher BoxOffice.com is forecasting a $215 million opening-weekend box office in the US and Canada, a new high for any film, when the movie makes its debut on December 18.

US ticketing sites struggled to keep up with demand in the first few hours tickets were available. Some fans trying to buy tickets received error messages, and Twitter users reported trouble reaching the US ticketing Fandango site, as well as those of some cinema chains.

"With such extraordinary demand, we saw intermittent technical challenges that caused some consumers to queue online longer than expected," Fandango said in a statement.

Movietickets.com said this week that The Force Awakens became its number one seller with 44 per cent of tickets sold in the prior 24 hours. But its site too succumbed for a time, posting this message: "Web server is returning an unknown error."

See the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens here

Bloomberg reported in the UK Odeon & UCI Cinemas Group said Monday online ticket sales for Star Wars set a record for the UK chain and caused booking delays at its website. The UK's Vue Entertainment Ltd. also had record advance ticket sales purchases, selling 10,000 in the first 90 minutes, according to an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg.

"We've seen massive traffic to our website today as guests book ahead for Star Wars and the new James Bond film Spectre," Simon Soffe, an Odeon & UCI spokesman, said Monday in an e-mail to Bloomberg.

Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne said in June that the movie could be the third highest-grossing film in history. He estimated The Force Awakens will take in $1.95 billion in ticket sales worldwide. That would place it behind Avatar at $2.8 billion and Titanic at $2.2 billion, according to data from Boxofficemojo.com.

Selling tickets two months before a film's debut is a strategy Hollywood has occasionally deployed in the past for its most highly-anticipated releases. The Force Awakens, directed by J.J. Abrams, has revealed itself in two earlier trailers to be very much an homage to the 1977 original.