Rogue One goes on sale

Here’s Felicity Jones at Good Morning America today. Thanksgiving is over. So it’s now a two week push for everyone, pretty much in every industry, to blast out as much work as possible before things start slowing down for the Christmas holiday. At the movies, that means we’ll see heavy promotion from the stars who are featured in December releases and by far, the biggest December release is Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

A new trailer just dropped in time for ticket sales. At 12:01am last night advance tickets became available for purchase and, like The Force Awakens last year, Rogue One caused online mayhem, crashing several ticketing sites, including the biggest, Fandango:

Due to an overwhelming amount of traffic, a wait room has been activated. Get #RogueOne tickets soon, you will. https://t.co/Hw6l2LkDYZ pic.twitter.com/4XiYvTMRhT— Fandango (@Fandango) November 28, 2016

They’re now saying Rogue One could bring in between $100 - $140 million in its first weekend, certainly well behind The Force Awakens but still big enough to be the 2nd biggest opening in December. And no one is expecting it to equal The Force Awakens anyway since this storyline features entirely new characters. I’m getting pretty excited about the diversity of these characters though. This new trailer ends with two characters, played by Asian men, quipping at each other. To me that’s a big deal, being that this will be the biggest movie of 2016, and it’s selling itself with faces that Hollywood typically doesn’t believe are sellable. So, yes, I’ll be buying my Rogue One tickets some time today, as soon as my friends figure out their schedules in and around December 16. Are you seeing it on the first weekend?