Abrams skirts Oscars talk for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’

The $33 million haul on Saturday gave Disney its biggest opening day ever in China.

The new “Star Wars” movie is now the highest grossing film in domestic box office history, has awesome reviews and has inspired conversations and theories all over the world. Worldwide, the only two movies still ahead of Star Wars: The Force Awakens are James Cameron’s Titanic ($2.187 billion) and Avatar ($2.788 billion).

Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened in China over the weekend and instantly broke box-office records in the country with its huge opening salvo.

Richard Huang, an analyst at Nomura Securities, expects the movie to roughly match the $229 million in Chinese box-office sales that “Jurassic World” generated past year. To build a buzz, Disney did a slew of promotions, starting from screening all six movies at the Shanghai International Film Festival a year ago to marching 500 storm troopers [characters from the francise] on the Great Wall of China for the first trailer debut.

Comeback… Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca and Harrison Ford as Han Solo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Addressing complaints his film is too reminiscent of the original trilogy, Abrams told The Hollywood Reporter: “It was obviously a wildly intentional thing that we go backwards, in some ways, to go forwards in the important ways”.

In the USA and Canada, it is the biggest movie ever and the first to pass $800 million with $812 million so far.

The director made specific reference to Hasbro’s Star Wars monopoly game, which did not include a playable version of Rey (according to Hasbro, it was so to not reveal the plot of the film).

China’s total box office take increased 49 per cent in 2015, according to state figures, generating $6.8bn in revenues.

In third place Friday was Gramercy Pictures’ “The Forest“, whose box-office estimate was just shy of $5 million.

Also in its third week in theaters, it made $15 million.

With this weekend, IMAX global box office now totals $179 million and in record-setting time: 26 days vs. Avatar, which reached $175 million in 58 days. Sisters, which stars Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, placed fifth with an estimated $7.2 million. Paramount’s “The Big Short” made $6.3 million.