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New 'Star Wars' Movie Trailer Debuts Black Friday In Theaters And Online

Virginia D'Cruz November 29, 2014 08:09 AM EST

Fans finally got a glimpse of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" when the sequel to the epic franchise premiered on Black Friday in select theaters and on iTunes.

"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is the much awaited seventh film in the franchise which is due for release in December next year. Fans even bought movie tickets just to see the 88-second trailer. The news of the trailer screening was inadvertently revealed by Regal Cinemas, prompting the studios behind the film, Disney and Lucasfilm, to release the full list of 30 theaters where the trailer would be shown.

Selling tickets just for a trailer might be strange for theater goers, but this is not new for the Star Wars film franchise. Fox employed the same tactic to great benefit in 1998 when it premiered the trailer of "The Phantom Menace" on 75 screens in the United States. It gave fans just four days notice to get their tickets.

However, that didn't dampen fans' enthusiasm and they flocked to the theaters to watch the trailer and quickly left once it was finished. They even skipped movies such as "Meet Joe Black" and "The Waterboy" even though these films were the big releases of the time.

Since the announcement of the trailers' debut in cinemas, Disney and Lucasfilm also announced that the trailer would be released on iTunes also on Black Friday.

Many sites upon learning of the release on iTunes called it an insult to those who had bought tickets to see the trailer in cinemas. Others noted that several fans would nevertheless treat the trailer's release in cinemas as an "event" and would turn up in costumes to watch it.

As for whether the Star Wars franchise is going to continue, it seems the studio is pretty certain of the bankability of the franchise and has already put in place plans to shoot the eight film at Pinewood studios and release it sometime in 2017.

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