TServo2049

Hello,

i only wanted to salute you and thank you for the amazing post about Star wars you wrote ot.

I´ve been searching for years about releases and first run and with your article, i think everything is clear.

Brilliant, really brilliant, thanks a lot,

Telémaco.

All the claims that Star Wars (it wasn't called A New Hope I'm 1977 so I will never use that to refer to its original run) made $307m in original release are wrong. That includes the 1978, 1979 and 1981 re-releases.

It actually made $221.3m in its true first run, and $43.8m from the summer 1978 re-release. The first run adjusts to $827.6m or $854.4m, depending on whether I calculate based on BOM's 2015 adjuster or their 2016 adjuster. I have no idea what the yearly average will come out to be - averaging those two values comes out to $841m, and using BOM's current Q4 2015 guesstimate of $8.61 to get a rough 2015 guesstimate of $8.41 gives us $834.6m.

That does seem low for how huge SW was, though the U.S. population was lower then. But there's a twist: I know people who do not consider the 1978 re-release a true re-release, but an extension of the first run, since the film was never out of theaters completely (at least one theater's engagement ran continuously through both releases). If you add the $43.8m of the 1978 "re-release" adjusted for inflation, you either get $1.016 billion at $8.61, or $983.7m at $8.34. Those two numbers average out to almost exactly $1 billion.

Either way, I wonder if the 2009-present NATO yearly averages don't produce accurate adjustments/estimated admissions for heavy 3D/IMAX/PLF releases whose true average paid price would be higher than the official NATO average for the entire theatrical market. No matter how well TFA does, I just cannot bring myself to believe it will end with more tickets sold than the original, either including or excluding the 1978 reissue (especially not including), even with 38 years of population growth. Not from all I know about how ridiculously huge the movie was.

Even though I just said $307m wasn't the actual first-run gross, from the prices I've been paying I do still wonder if it would still be best to compare against a ballpark of $1.2 billion for SW's original run. If you take the $221.3m divided by the official 1977 average of $2.23, that's 99.24 million tickets. If you take the $43.8m and divide it by the 1978 average of $2.34, you get another 18.72 million tickets. The total of both runs would be 117.96 million admissions. If you assume the entire $265.1m up to the end of the 1978 reissue would be equivalent to TFA making $1.2b, then the theoretical average ticket price it would be adjusted to would be $10.17. But if you assume just the $221.3m of the original run would be the same as TFA making $1.2b, then the theoretical average paid price for TFA would be $12.09.

So let's say TFA does in fact hit $1b. That would mean it would need to sell 98.3m tickets at an average of $10.17, or 82.7m tickets at an average of $12.09. Either way, if it gets to $1b I am convinced it will be doing it off of fewer admissions than we would assume off of whatever the 2015 national average turns out to be.

redfirebird2008, are you still around? Can you weigh in?