You don't need a spectacular Star Wars movie to break records.
You just need a competent one with fun/witty characters/dialogue. That's basically all The Force Awakens had to do.
Phantom Menace would've broke a lot of Titanic's records if had been a competent movie, the fact that it still made so much money based on hype says a lot.
None of TFA, Avatar, Jurassic World, or Avengers are spectacular movies IMO. Ditto for Furious 7. So being a masterpiece isn't a pre-requisite for anything.
Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2, The Matrix, the original Jurassic Park are all faaaaar better than TFA, Avatar, Jurassic World, Avengers, Furious 7.
Star Wars just needed a competent movie as a franchise and it got that. The prequels were basically like watching someone give a speech who rips a loud fart every 2 minutes ... you just could not take them seriously as movies because something stupid would happen every second scene or it would be a boring ass lifeless sequence with people sitting around talking about things like in a commitee.