In a 2012 interview, “Star Wars” creator George Lucas made the feeble claim that the release of another episode in his now-38-year-old sci-fi franchise is “not a religious event. I hate to tell people that. It’s a movie, just a movie.” Needless to say, such a remark merely fans the flames of devotion accorded to one of Hollywood’s all-time most popular series, whose every new release sparks a fanatical response of such zealotry that any self-respecting sociologist could only describe it as “religious” in nature.
And unless you’ve been asleep this past week — or since September, when the marketing campaign including movie trailers, TV commercials, interviews, T-shirts, trading cards, and action figures began — even the least ardent fans know that “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the seventh film in the series, opens in the U.S. on December 18, with 1,600 screenings (compared with the 1977 series premiere’s booking into only 30 theaters, because the head honchos at 20th Century Fox thought the movie was destined to be a box-office dud), attracting droves of ticket-buyers in certain cities who queued days before the opening to be among the very first to screen the new film.
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