“Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the seventh episode in the “Star Wars” series of movies, broke box office record after box office record over the weekend. Basically, it’s the biggest movie ever, even if it’s not the greatest. (Don’t send me hate mail — it’s a pretty good movie.) According to the latest estimates, “The Force Awakens” raked in $529 million globally — an absolutely staggering opening for J. J. Abrams and company.
But “The Force Awakens” also made a ripple or two on social media, and unlike during the last two sets of “Star Wars” trilogies, it’s a little tougher to avoid spoilers.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, in the 30 days that led up to the release of “The Force Awakens,” there were over 126 million interactions on Facebook about the movie. This really marks a turning point in the way we talk see and enjoy movies.
Today, seeing a movie seems to be much more of a collective experience than it would initially appear. Not only are we sitting beside our friends in the theater but we’re also talking to people all around the world about what we’re seeing.
Google did its best to help people avoid spoilers. The search giant went so far as to have a Chrome extension that blocked out certain websites that contained possible spoilers!
Obviously, social media has made the plot hard to keep quiet for this long. It’s a challenge not faced by George Lucas and the whole, “Luke, I am your father” thing, but, generally speaking, the good people of the internet were surprisingly polite when discussing the new movie on their social media platforms.
Have you seen the movie yet? Did your friends ruin the movie for you on Facebook or Twitter, or worse, did you ruin the movie for somebody else? Let us know in the comments below.
