Star Wars: The Force Awakens is coming. Depending on when you’re reading this, you may have already seen the seventh Star Wars movie. There’s a lot of debate and concern about how good or bad the movie is going to be. That’s fine, because it’s the sort of talk that accompanies any major release. There’s one undeniable fact, though, and that’s that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is already a big success.
Could that be overconfidence talking? Maybe it is, but it’s justified. There’s been a lot of Star Wars hype building over the past year. Tons of merchandise has been moved. When you think about it, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is partially responsible for all that, and it’s because of that movement that someone could consider the movie to have already done exactly what Lucasfilm, Bad Robot, and Disney wanted it to.
Think about the number of Star Wars toys that have been sold this year. Back in around August, most retailers made a big deal about selling items based on the movie, even though it wouldn’t be released until December. There was even a launch event at Toys R Us. It worked. The items sold. People were excited and enthusiastic about Star Wars in a way they hadn’t been in years.
This doesn’t just apply to regular toys. It carried over to the world of video games too. Unfortunately, Disney doesn’t supply sales figures for its Disney Infinity line, but Star Wars: The Force Awakens has to have an impact on Disney Infinity 3.0 . While Marvel was the champion of the third game, Star Wars has been a selling point for the third. It’s hard to believe Disney would go to the trouble of creating special light-up NFC figures for major Star Wars characters if the game wasn’t doing well. There’s even a The Force Awakens set and characters to coincide with the movie’s launch.
Finally, there’s Star Wars Battlefront . We know this online, multiplayer shooter has issues. There’s a problem with content distribution. Still, despite coming out at about the same time as Fallout 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops III , Star Wars Battlefront hasn’t done too badly. It was EA’s largest digital launch and, while exact numbers aren’t in, is supposedly the fourth biggest launch of 2015. People’s renewed excitement and love for the series in the face of the seventh movie surely helped this game sell.
It will be days and weeks before we can finally start talking about Star Wars: The Force Awakens ‘ success as a movie and continuation of the series. People will probably have to see it more than once to be in a good place to judge it, cinematically, and more casual viewers will want to wait to see how it does its first weekend. But you have to admit that, thanks to its existence, the series in general is a good place right now.