Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Is Dominating the Box Office in One Key Area

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker exploded to a $177.4 million opening weekend and kept running to $1 billion worldwide, but there was a secret advantage that the film ended up having. A new report from Forbes tells the story of the movie’s box office performance, and it looks like people underestimated the power of weeknight moviegoers. That steady stream of people continuing to go to theaters and catch the latest release in the Star Wars series might make its overall showing even more impressive. People called the box-office run for the film disappointing despite bringing in $1 billion dollars and cited the contrast between its performance and the other sequel trilogy movies. But, upon further inspection, things get a whole lot more interesting.

Looking at 10-week runs from other films that got out to these massive openings helps show how healthy the Rise of Skywalker run has been. It had the 12th biggest domestic opening weekend of all-time with that $177 million showing. But, that total still lagged behind other Marvel fare like Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Fast-forward to now and Rise of Skywalker has already passed both of those film’s lifetime totals. The end of the Skywalker Saga sits at $514 million while Age of Ultron and Civil War only got to $459 and $408 million respectively.

Even more curious is the fact that Rise of Skywalker could end up eclipsing some other favorite big-budget blockbusters. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ($532 million), The Dark Knight ($535 million), and The Lion King from last year ($543 million) are all within reach. The big hurdle for the film will be getting to those numbers while only being shown in 558 theaters. But, stranger things have happened and this is a far cry from some of the “disaster” claims that were being made in the immediate release window of the film.

One tactic could have allowed them even more time to plan and generate even more revenue. Both J.J. Abrams and Chris Terrio debated splitting the last movie in the Skywalker Saga into two entries, but decided against it.

“I wish we could have done that,” Terrio explained to Awards Daily because of all the moving parts in Skywalker. “There is a lot of plot in the movie, and as a writer, you always want scenes to let the plot breathe more. If there were a way of doing it, splitting it would have been my dream.”