Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice has just kicked off the billion-dollar box office for 2016, but what about Rogue One, the successor to last year’s most successful film: Star Wars: The Force Awakens, due to be released in December. Here are my Rogue One box office predictions.
Of course, it’s still ridiculously early to be making any concrete predictions for the next Star Wars film’s box office takings; we haven’t even had a proper trailer as of yet, but given that The Force Awakens has now effectively finished its record-breaking theatrical run, we can have a good stab at it.
The few predictions that have come out so far have varied widely, from as low as $500-600m to as high as $1.6bn. One thing that we can all be absolutely sure of is that this won’t make anywhere near as much money as The Force Awakens, or the future Episode VIII and IX coming in 2017 and 2019 respectively.
Bear in mind that Rogue One is a film made for die-hard fans of Star Wars. It’s set just before the events of A New Hope, and tells of the team of X-Wing pilots who set out to steal the plans for the Death Star, and seeing as we already know what happens (they succeed), there definitely won’t be as big a hype train, or general audience attraction as new stories in the series will have.
Having said that, the monumental success of The Force Awakens, becoming the third highest-grossing film of all time with $2.06bn (as of writing), will ensure that Rogue One is another big box office success for Disney and Lucasfilm.
Allegedly set to have the tone of a war/heist film, Rogue One is also unlikely to pull in much younger audiences (i.e. 5-9 year olds) as the main saga films have done, but you can guarantee that everyone in the prime demographic, that is 12-30 year olds, will definitely go and see this movie, and, if it’s got enough new information to bring to the table with regards to the new Star Wars canon, then it’ll be getting the same repeat viewings that The Force Awakens did at the end of 2015 into early 2016.
Also, Rogue One will be released on December 16, taking the exact same box office slot as The Force Awakens and Episode VIII, which is being dubbed as the new big blockbuster season after summer. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that the viewing habits we saw from audiences for The Force Awakens will be repeated this year.
In the end, Rogue One will undoubtedly be a success. It won’t reach the mighty heights of The Force Awakens, but, provided that its marketing campaign is as strong as it was last year, and the end product is really good, die-hard Star Wars fans will easily propel this to the top five box office earners by the end of 2016.
It’s not facing too much competition in December, so that should help too, but it won’t match the superhero films like Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War this year in ultimate worldwide gross.
Overall, I’m predicting that Rogue One will cross the magical 1 billion dollar mark, and wind up with a final worldwide gross of about $1.1bn (and a worldwide opening weekend of $300m+), making it the second highest-grossing Star Wars film of all. That depends significantly on the film being good, but if it is, we fans who love this series like no other will come back time and again to see Rogue One, and make it a great box office success.
