'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' sets record for pre-sale ticket sales

Despite not being released until December, Star Wars: The Force Awakens has already set a record for pre-orders and grossed $6.5 million in the US.

'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' will officially hit theaters on December 18 this year. Photo: Reuters.

IMAX theater chain said that the number of pre-orders for Star Wars: The Force Awakens has far exceeded the first-day sales of two blockbusters, The Dark Knight Rises (2012) and Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), with each film earning about $1 million.

Tickets for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which opens on December 18, went on sale online, but theater chain Alamo Drafthouse suffered a temporary outage as fans rushed to its website to purchase tickets. Alamo Drafthouse apologized for the "frustration" on Twitter after customers were unable to purchase tickets.

Online ticketing site Fandango said on October 20 that it had seen “unprecedented demand for tickets.” The company declined to give an exact figure for ticket sales for the film, only saying it was eight times larger than 2011’s The Hunger Games.

Meanwhile, MovieTickets.com also did not disclose ticket sales, only saying that Star Wars: The Force Awakens was the movie with the highest number of pre-orders in the history of this online ticketing website and accounted for 95% of tickets sold in the past 24 hours.

The third trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens attracted 15.9 million views when it debuted at halftime of the Philadelphia Eagles' game against the New York Giants, ESPN said, adding that the average viewership for this year's Monday Night Football season was about 13.5 million.

Twitter said there were more than 17,000 tweets per minute after the trailer aired, and more than 1.1 million tweets about it in the following 12 hours.

Facebook counted 1.3 million people engaging in 2.1 million interactions within the first hour of the trailer's release. To date, it has garnered more than 13 million views on YouTube and 8.8 million views on Facebook.

According to TT&VH