STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS Toys are Gonna Make HOW MUCH?!

Everybody knows that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is gonna make a billion truckloads of $100m bills. I mean, it would be more of a shock if it bombs completely; its success is all but a complete guarantee, and Jurassic World should be happy with its #3 billing on the highest-grossing movies list while it has it. Perhaps Titanic shouldn’t sit too comfortably either. And Avatar…

While box office recipients are obviously vital with big movies such as this, the big dough is actually in merchandising. The Star Wars franchise has grossed a total of $20b over the decades (and that figure is a little outdated as well) and other series’ can stay afloat just from toy sales – like Cars, with its billions grossed since 2006. While those figures are obviously astronomical, they all came about from a number of years of brand recognition and trust from consumers. If the latest estimate is to be believed, then The Force Awakens could reach a quarter of what every single toy ever sold has accumulated under the name Star Wars in a year.

Macquarie Securities analyst Tim Nollen published a big-ass report on Monday (via THR) all about the House of Mouse and their bright-looking last quarter of 2015.

“After a 16 percent fall in the shares in the past four weeks, we think investors now have an interesting entry point to a stock with three major near-term catalysts.”

Those three catalysts are the new football season on ESPN (boring), Star Wars (yay!) and the opening of a new Disney park in Shanghai (yay, but not near me). He speculates that the movie “could generate $5 billion in consumer merchandise sales in its first year of release, assuming it does better than Cars 2’s $3 billion.” Pretty hefty figures, but after paying all the toy companies and stores etc it would only net Disney $500m – and I can’t believe I just wrote the word ‘only’ in front of that.

You can actually start sending Disney your money this Friday; the toy range is kicking off with a big event called ‘Force Friday,’ where they will be unboxing a different toy every hour across 18-hours in a YouTube special. If that isn’t consumerism to the extreme then I don’t know what is.

“We also estimate the movie itself should gross about $2 billion at the global box office, netting nearly $1.2 billion in revenue for the company.”

$2b sounds about right.

It might be just me, but there seems to be this very communal feeling around The Force Awakens. It looks absolutely brilliant and J.J. Abrams and everybody else involved seems incredibly enthusiastic and happy with it; we all know it’s gonna be at least pretty good, and we all know it’s going to make a ton of money – the questions just are how good and how much. We’re all in the same boat, sitting and waiting in anticipation. Rarely do we get a movie like that, and while that kinda sucks it just makes this experience all the more special. I’ll always remember it, telling my little grandkids about the time we all read those spoilers on that fansite a year and a half before the movie came out.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits theaters December 18th.