This post was originally published by In A Far Away Galaxy.
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Star Wars was a true block buster – people queued for hours to see the movie
Following on the fins of the original blockbuster Jaws, here’s a picture that that shows people queuing to see the original Star Wars movies in 1977.
Check out how it was advertised as being a 70mm print and in 6 track stereo sound!
It did not have a huge publicity campaign like say a Finding Nemo or Man of Steel, it simply started out as a normal movie opening at 43 locations across the United States and not some few thousand like modern times. Word of mouth spread very quickly as to how could this movie was.
It went, in the modern internet sense, viral and people very quickly became infected with just how good the movie was! And pictures like the above were the result. The rest is history as people loved the film and started queuing to see the film again and again.
In 70mm reports that Star Wars was “An immediate sensation, “Star Wars” (which TIME Magazine proclaimed “The Year’s Best Movie” only five months into the year) accumulated incredible per-screen averages and broke numerous box office and attendance records at the few locations lucky enough to have been playing the movie. The film industry was abuzz, and exhibitors everywhere couldn’t wait to get their hands on a print. The film’s distributor, 20th Century-Fox, had the lab cranking out prints as fast as they could as they accelerated their plans for a broad, nationwide release of the film.”
Eventually, the film was shown at over 1000 film theatres across the States and became the greatest box office hit in history, beating Jaws that came two years before in 1975.
