Star Wars: The Force Awakens set to premiere in Los Angeles

When the first Star Wars movie premiered at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in May 1977, 20th Century Fox still believed its big hit of that summer would be an adaptation of Sidney Sheldon’s steamy bestseller The Other Side of Midnight. The studio had such low expectations of George Lucas’s sci-fi curio that the cinema’s owners were told they need only show it for two weeks.

Almost 40 years later, the queue outside the Chinese tells a different story: Star Wars super-fans have been lining up for more than a week outside the cinema to catch the first showing of The Force Awakens, the seventh instalment in what is arguably the most successful film franchise of all time. The film’s premiere is tonight, though it is not officially released until this Thursday, 17 December.

Fans who have spent at least 24 hours in the queue will be permitted to purchase a pair of tickets to the premiere. Before tonight’s event, two Australian fans at the front of the queue will be married in a Star Wars-themed wedding being organised by Grauman’s, which now owns the Chinese Theatre. The bride will be walked down the aisle by Darth Vader.

The premiere will sprawl across three cinemas on Hollywood Boulevard: the Chinese; the El Capitan; and the Dolby Theatre, where the Oscars are routinely held. On Oscar night, one block of the famous strip – home to the Hollywood Walk of Fame – is closed to traffic. For The Force Awakens, four whole blocks have been closed since late Thursday evening.

Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill, veterans of the original trilogy, reprise their roles as Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker in the new film. They are expected to join its younger stars on the red carpet, including Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Domhnall Gleason and British actors Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Andy Serkis and Gwendoline Christie.

The original Star Wars began its theatrical run in a mere 30 cinemas in the US. The ticketing firm Fandango says advance ticket sales for The Force Awakens have already outstripped any other movie. In the UK, the Odeon cinema chain has already sold a record-breaking half-a-million tickets for the film’s opening week.

Industry experts expect the film to earn as much as $2bn (£1.3bn) at the global box office. According to a report by CBS’ 60 Minutes, The Force Awakens must make at least $1.5bn to be thought of as a commercial success on Wall Street, where Disney needs to prove its investment in the franchise was sound. The studio bought Lucasfilm for $4bn in 2012 and has spent $200m on production of The Force Awakens, plus hundreds of millions more on marketing and merchandising.

The highest-grossing movie to date is James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster Avatar, which took in $2.8bn worldwide. Whether The Force Awakens can match that figure depends on whether people like it enough to see it more than once – and whether they advise their friends to do the same. Steven Spielberg told 60 Minutes that the responsibility has the film’s director, JJ Abrams, “terrified.”

Tonight's event will be streaming live at StarWars.com beginning at 5:30pm PT (8:30pm ET).