Could Disney Re-Release Star Wars: The Force Awakens to Hit $1 Billion Domestic?

With over $936.6 million in domestic box office, Star Wars: The Force Awakens finished its U.S. run well on top of the heap, beating out second place by around $175 million. However, it also finished just $64 million shy of the previously thought unachievable $1 billion domestic mark. Titanic and Avatar, who also still reign over The Force Awakens in worldwide gross, both did their final numbers with the help of a re-release, so is one in the future for The Force Awakens?

Titanic is fairly hard to do a direct comparison. Its re-release in theaters came fifteen years after the original run of the film, and it added in 3D to boot. With that anniversary year mentality and the new dimension (no pun intended) of entertainment, it pulled in a huge $57.9 million domestic gross. It also opened in an April that had not yet felt the Summer creep - since that film's release, April has become a sort of Summer preview month, as the blockbuster lineup continues to expand outside of the the previously typical May-August timeframe.

In the case of Avatar, which The Force Awakens is a closer mirror of, the "Avatar: Special Edition" hit theaters just over eight months after the film originally hit. It also only did an extra $10.7 million, which is a far cry of what Disney would need to give Star Wars that extraordinary one billion dollar gold star.

So if Disney was to re-release The Force Awakens, looking to bump it to that next level, when would be the best time to do it? The first thought that comes to mind is releasing it around a month prior to the release of the direct sequel Star Wars: Episode VIII, which hits theaters December 15, 2017. The Rian Johnson-written and directed film continues the story of Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), Poe (Oscar Isaac), and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), and around a month prior should be when fandom is at a fever pitch, anxious for more. The problem is, November 2017 is already getting crowded.

Disney has two releases that month: Marvel Studios' Thor: Ragnarok on November 3, and Pixar's Coco on (Wednesday) November 22. On top of that, Warner Bros. has Justice League set for November 17, a date that no other distributor has dared to claim yet. Disney could potentially throw The Force Awakens back in theaters that day, knowing that there aren't any other new alternatives planned against Justice League, and not cannibalizing their own sales of Thor 3 too much since it will have already had its first two weekends, not to mention jabbing at their rivals a bit there. They could also release the following Friday, November 24, though it would be pushing things a bit to issue a re-release two days after a brand new film from one of their hottest studios. While they're not direct translations of audience, there's enough crossover between Pixar and Lucasfilm fans that it would be odd (Buena Vista, Disney's distributing arm, almost never release films from any of their studios less than 3 weeks apart).

The best and most probable scenario for a re-release is probably December 1, 2017. That would put The Force Awakens back in theaters for two weeks before Episode VIII hits, making it ideal catch-up time, and great for the inevitable double-feature programs major theater chains will want to run anyway. There are currently zero movies with December 1 as a reserved date, and only a Sony/Columbia animated movie on the 8th, meaning TFA could fairly easily pull in that magic number of $64 million (and all without hurting their own other business much, if at all).

Any way you slice it, the record-breaking first-ever film to the $900 million mark is an incredible accomplishment, and shows the power of the Star Wars universe nicely... but a billion dollars would still be something special. We'll see if that's in the future for Disney next year.