New ‘Star Wars’ film smashes presales record in Wichita

Everyone in the movie business thought tickets for the new film “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” would sell fast.

The release was such a big deal that Les Padzensky and Dan Gray, the two vice presidents in charge of operations at Warren Theatres, were staring at a screen with their IT person the evening of Oct. 19 when tickets went on sale.

The numbers just kept ticking up and up. “We were selling an ungodly amount of tickets every minute,” Padzensky said.

Unlike several national movie sites, Warren’s website didn’t crash. Padzensky said they sold approximately three times as many presale tickets that day as they did for their previous biggest release, “Jurassic World.”

Fandango reported that “The Force Awakens” sold eight times as many tickets as its previous record-holder, “The Hunger Games,” and IMAX sales smashed the previous record from “The Dark Knight.” Total U.S. sales have already surpassed $50 million, according to a report Friday in the Wall Street Journal, and could top $100 million before it even opens, although Padzensky said ticket sales have steadied since the initial burst.

A majority of tickets are sold online these days, Padzensky said, so it’s not surprising that the latest big blockbuster broke the presale record. What many movie commentators and studio heads are wondering is whether “The Force Awakens” also will break the all-time record for sales set by “Avatar” in 2009, which grossed more than $2.7 billion worldwide.

Padzensky expects it will.

One reason is that people like him still remember the first time they saw the very first “Star Wars”: May 28, 1977, the Saturday after it opened. He was sitting in the front row of the balcony at the Cinerama theater in Denver.

“I still remember that ship coming over our heads (at the beginning of the movie),” Padzensky said. “And you could could just feel the whole theater rumbling.”

Some “Star Wars” fans have said they will dress up as stormtroopers and Darth Vader on opening night at the theater on West 21st Street, Padzensky said. Everyone is welcome to dress up, but they are not allowed to bring in weapons such as light sabers, or wear face makeup or masks.

Superfans such as these will pay to see the movie multiple times in IMAX, 3-D and in the Warren’s largest theater, the Grand Auditorium at the East 13th Street location. The film will be showing on 13 screens across the Warren Theatres, four to five times a day. The IMAX screen has added a fifth showing to accommodate the extra demand. Although a handful of tickets are still available for the opening day, Padzensky said, there is more availability after that.

Children are out of school over the holidays, he added, so many families will have free time to see the movie multiple times.

But the generational appeal of “Star Wars” may also be a weakness: Overseas audiences such as those in China, which accounted for the vast majority of “Avatar” sales, don’t have the same attachment to the “Star Wars” franchise. Even after adjusting for inflation from 1977, the first “Star Wars” film, the most popular in the franchise, didn’t make as much money as “Avatar.”

But it may make up in merchandise what it falls short of in ticket sales. Several retail analysts have predicted that sales of “Star Wars” merchandise will be several billion dollars.

Warren Theatres is hosting a special marathon of all seven “Star Wars” episodes on Dec. 17, which will start at 4 a.m. with “The Phantom Menace” and will, with 15-minute breaks, proceed chronologically until the latest installment at 7 p.m. The marathon cost $50 and sold out the day it was offered, Padzensky said.

The national marketers of the “Star Wars” franchise have typically cultivated a sense of exclusivity by not allowing special screenings of the movies, according to Padzensky, so the marathon is a rare opportunity for fans to see the movies in a theater. Disney, which owns “Star Wars,” has limited the size of the theater that shows the marathon and is requiring that it play on a screen with 3-D capability.

Disney also is requiring that theaters keep the movie on the same screen for four weeks for 3-D screens, and three weeks for all others. Typically, for big films, studios require a film to be shown for two weeks on the same screen before theaters can switch to a different movie.

That means some theaters are trying to balance soaking up the huge sales the first couple of weeks with the screen time that “Star Wars” will take up later on. Theaters in other cities have added showings as late as 2 a.m. to try to maximize the opening-week audience on as few screens as possible, according to The Guardian.

Although Wichita sometimes has movies that do better or worse than they do nationally, Padzensky said the big films do about the same in Kansas as they do in New York or Los Angeles.

“Midwesterners see things differently than East and West coasters,” Padzensky said. “But not when it comes to ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Avatar.’ ”

This story was originally published November 20, 2015 at 5:39 PM with the headline "New ‘Star Wars’ film smashes presales record in Wichita."