Via Comicbook.com:

It took only 90 seconds of Star Wars: The Force Awakens to make the film, the seventh episode in the series and the first produced by new Lucasfilm owner Disney, a massive financial success. In 24 hours, the second teaser trailer, premiered at Star Wars Celebration Anaheim in April, was viewed 88 million times worldwide. In the first two hours of its release, Disney stock’s overall company valuation skyrocketed up by $2 billion.

So yes, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is and will be a massive success. But will its actual theatrical release surpass the rest of 2015’s blockbuster releases?

Signs point, right now, to probably.

There are two different things to consider when looking at a movie’s success in the theater: Domestic gross, meaning how much money it made in ticket sales in the U.S., and Worldwide gross, which includes the rest of the international market. The former has usually been considered more important by Hollywood studios; in the domestic market, they control marketing and distribution, so they are spending less to put a movie into theaters, and they make a larger share of the profits. In the international market, studios are usually (but less in recent years) farming out distribution rights to local-to-those-countries companies, as well as marketing, resulting in lower profit shares.

In recent years, however, they international market has shown exponential growth, especially in the big budget blockbuster. Take a look at 2015’s current box office leaders. Avengers: Age of Ultron has taken over as the domestic gross leader after only three weekends of release, sitting at the top of the charts with $380.8 million at press time. That put it over the top of Furious 7, which opened a month earlier, and sits at $344.6 million. No other film has broken even the two hundred million mark, and therefore the rest get left out of this conversation. But worldwide gross is a different story; well, it’s different in parts – those two are the only 2015 releases worthy of conversation, as they’re the only ones to even be in the top 100 all-time worldwide grosses. But while Age of Ultron has already passed the $1 billion mark with $1.151 billion total so far, Furious 7 has proven a more interesting anomaly: only 23% of its gross is domestic, resulting in $1.49 billion so far worldwide, and leaving it only $30 million shy of passing the first Avengers film for third all-time. Most major releases of the last fifteen years (which also comprise 18 of the worldwide gross leaders in the top 21) hover between 33% and as high as 53% in domestic gross.

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