Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker on track for $450 million global debut

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens this weekend, and we all know it’s going to make a lot of money.

But how much money? There’s no way to know for sure, but the experts over at Deadline predict the movie’s worldwide take on opening weekend to be in the neighborhood of $450 million.

That’s roughly what The Last Jedi took in on its opening weekend in 2017, although short of what The Force Awakens made when it debuted back in 2015 ($528.9 million, FYI). Per Deadline, no one is expecting Rise to equal the haul of The Force Awakens, which is the fourth highest-grossing movie of all time. That’s down to a bunch of factors. For one, there’s just no matching the hype of a new movie that continues one of the most beloved stories of all time after 32 years away (10 if you’re counting the prequels, which sort of tell a different story). There’s also the matter of backlash to The Last Jedi. After some fans felt burned by that movie, Deadline predicts they may wait a bit to see how the word of mouth is on Rise before seeing it themselves.

And then there’s China, which is a huge film market that never quite warmed to Star Wars. The Force Awakens did decently there due to “the curiosity factor,” as Deadline puts it, but The Last Jedi didn’t fare as well. Disney has been trying its darndest to make Star Wars a thing in China, including by producing an original Chinese Star Wars story for a popular reading platform. We’ll see if their efforts paid off soon enough.

Deadline posits that The Rise of Skywalker might be the last major opening until 2021, when movies like Thor: Love and Thunder, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, The Matrix 4 and Avatar 2 come out. There are some major releases to come in 2020 — including The Eternals, Black Widow, Wonder Woman 1984, Mulan and Fast & Furious 9 — so I dunno about that, but it’ll be 2020 before we know it and we can judge for ourselves.

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