Theres more than just that, the marketing campaing and keeping the mistery about the plot worked wonders, but theres also nostalgia and the fact that Eps 1-3 sucked at play, if 1-3 had been great I dont think ppl would have this much craving for a new Star Wars, itd sell super well but I dont think it would be this insane. Also the reviews both professionaly and by viewers and the word of mouth have been generaly favorable wich helpped a lot as well.

It can outrgross Avatar, its hard but possible, itll likely do 1 billion on USA alone its left for the rest fo the world to do the other 1.5 billion. Right now it seens liek worldwide itll end at 1.2 or so billion (the movie is strong worldwide but not nearly as strong as it is on the USA rigth now), but who knows, it still ahs to open on China, the chinese might go nuts watching it and send it over the 1.5 bil worldwide mark.

Well he did make a thread saying Avatar 2 will gross $3B, so I'm guessing he means both.

adjusted for inflation I don't know if this will sell as many tickets as Titanic

it has no way of beating Avatar. it will beat the Avatar domestic number but it will not come close to the Worldwide numbers of Avatar, Star Wars seems almost as popular in the USA as it is everywhere else in the world combined. Avatar was a phenomena internationally 

It can outrgross Avatar, its hard but possible, itll likely do 1 billion on USA alone its left for the rest fo the world to do the other 1.5 billion. Right now it seens liek worldwide itll end at 1.2 or so billion (the movie is strong worldwide but not nearly as strong as it is on the USA rigth now), but who knows, it still ahs to open on China, the chinese might go nuts watching it and send it over the 1.5 bil worldwide mark.

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ehhh Star Wars is far from a certainty of breaking a billion in the USA. 850 million or so are some guesstimates people are thinking of. unfortunately Star Wars is performing nowhere near as well internationally as it is domestically.

for this to have any chance of even coming close to the likes of 2.5 billion it would need China to have a giant opening. 

the odds of it beating Avatar worldwide are virtually zero based on the opening last week or two in international markets. again, I'm talking worldwide totals

Fair assessment: if it does crack 1B in the US, that would trend towards 2B US+RoW-China. Asking for another 800MM from China is a lot. I want it to happen, but it will require some crazy legs.

Fastest to one billion this would have happened a couple days earlier if it already would be playing in China.

Why the hate for Avatar?

Bad plot and dialogue and meh acting. There's nothing outstanding about it. I can't deny it's beautiful, yeah, but it fails on everything else. 

I was thinking about it and TFA might actually do decently well in China. My reason being it is very much a soft-reboot of the franchise and is a great place to start for people who have never seen a Star Wars movie before. They explain the force decently (which I find super important for understanding SW) and the plot is easy to follow much like the movie it imitates.

The only thing that might confuse Chinese audiences is the references to the older movies. TFA definitely panders a lot to OG Trilogy fans, so I'm not sure if they'd be lost by some of the callbacks they make. As I recall, some of the callbacks they did were as bad as 3D movies trying to push the "oooohh look at this, it's 3D!" sorta vein (I'm looking at you Han Solo randomly appearing in the movie XD). Works for people who have nostalgia for SW, not so much for people who have probably only seen the Prequels

Sure that helps too but not as much as marketing. Look at Jurassic World - the franchise was dead but the marketing pushed to a $1.7B movie.

In any case, Star Wars won't have legs outside of the US - it grossed less in RotW than the US during this past week-end. It will need some serious legs in the US and some $500M from China to come close to Avatar.