We are less than three weeks away from the release ofRogue One: A Star Wars Story. Fans have been dying to get their hands onStar Wars ticketsso they can secure a seat for opening night and last night, they finally got their chance. A lot of people bought tickets, but things did not go over smoothly everywhere and that left a lot of unhappyStar Warsfans out there.
Everyone knew thedemand for ticketswould be high, but that wasn’t enough to prevent technical difficulties. Ticketing siteFandango, one of the most popular places to buy movie tickets, experienced crashes due to the high-demand last night. Tickets forRogue One: A Star Wars Storywent on sale at 12:01 E.T. and within a few hours of that Fandango was having some serious problems, leaving some buyers in a bad spot and unable to get tickets for showings near them. After a while, Fandango decided to create a waiting room, which sort of fixed the problem. They tried to ice over the situation by tweeting out a gif of Yoda with the following message.
“Due to an overwhelming amount of traffic, a wait room has been activated. Get #RogueOne tickets soon, you will.”
Nobody is really expectingRogue Oneto do whatStar Wars: The Force Awakensdid at the box office, but it will still absolutely crush, as evidenced by these crashes. By the timeThe Force Awakenshit theaters it had sold more than $100 million in advance tickets.Star Wars: Rogue Onemay not hit those crazy numbers, but it will certainly be big and the power of Disney, especially when combined with the power ofStar Wars, should never be underestimated. Given what happened last night, the presale numbers at least could come close to whatStar Wars: The Force Awakensdid, since there were similar crashes and problems when theticket pre-salestarted for that movie last year. Atom Tickets, who had an exclusive deal worked out with Disney and Lucasfilm for the presale, decided to take advantage of Fandango’s issues and tried to coax users over to their ticketing platform on Twitter. Their account replied to a Fandango user on Twitter with this.
“No worries! You can still buy tix AND exclusive gear through the #atomtickets app! #RogueOne”
Rogue One: A Star Wars Storyhas very high expectations placed on it, both in terms of quality and box office, just by virtue of the fact that it is aStar Wars movie. It is currently on track to make around $130 million opening weekend, but box office tracking has been somewhat unreliable for big movies lately, so it could easily top that. If it does come in at $130 million, Disney and Lucasfilm would still be very happy and it would be one of the biggest opening weekends of 2016, falling shy of onlyBatman V. Superman: Dawn of Justiceand two other Disney releases,Captain America: Civil WarandFinding Dory.
This is the very first everStar Warsspinoff movie and it will tell the story of how the Rebels got their hands on the Death Star plans, as teased in the opening crawl inStar Wars: A New Hope. The movie starsFelicity Jones,Mads Mikkelsen,Riz Ahmed,Ben Mendelsohn,Alan Tudyk,Diego Luna,Jiang Wen,Donnie Yen,Wen JiangandForest Whitaker, in addition to featuring Darth Vader, who is once again being voiced byJames Earl Jones.Rogue One: A Star Wars Storyhits theaters on December 16 and tickets are on sale now.
