Star Wars: The Force Awakens continues to shatter records and dominate the box office as we head into 2016. After a strong New Year’s Eve and a record breaking New Year’s Day ($34,460,000), Box Office Mojo reports that Star Wars now sits at $686,425,583, officially passing Titanic as the second highest grossing domestic film of all time only 15 days after its release. Avatar has dominated the top spot for the previous six years with its total of $760,507,625, but if Star Wars continues its trending daily box office totals, we can expect it to become the highest grossing domestic film of all time by the end of next week.
Counting for worldwide box office, Star Wars is currently the seventh highest grossing film with $1.39 billion. It will be quite impressive if it is able to pass up Avatar’s whopping worldwide gross of $2.79 billion. Avatar had a huge audience overseas and Star Wars will be hard pressed to pass it up. However, it has yet to release in China which will be its largest market overseas; it is slated for a January 9th release and is expected to rake in an approximate $300 million.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens currently holds the record for the largest opening weekend and also became the quickest movie to gross $1 billion worldwide only 12 days after its release. The record was previously held by Jurassic World which did so in 13 days. We have yet to see if Star Wars will have the same staying power in the box office that Avatar became so well-known for, but given the current trend, and assuming that Star Wars is capable of holding onto its momentum, it will come as no surprise if it continues to shatter records and set precedents.
