15 Most Highly-Anticipated Blockbuster Movies In History

If you thought the anticipation levels surrounding Star Wars: The Force Awakens were huge, it had nothing on the buzz surrounding The Phantom Menace almost two decades earlier. As the first new Star Wars movie in sixteen years, Episode I dominated the cultural conversation in the build-up to its May 19 release, with die-hard fans proving their loyalty and then some.

Queues starting forming outside theaters over a month before tickets went on sale, people were buying full-price tickets for movies they had no interest in seeing just so they could watch the trailer (with many leaving immediately afterward) and it was estimated that over two million employees in the United States skipped work to see it on opening day, with many companies just deciding to not to open that day to save themselves the hassle.

To the surprise of absolutely no-one, The Phantom Menace took the box office by storm and would end up as the second highest-grossing movie of all time behind Titanic by the time its theatrical run ended, earning a huge $924.3m (almost as much as the combined earnings of the original trilogy) with almost 85 million tickets sold in domestic theaters alone.

It certainly wasn't the movie that Star Wars fans had been hoping for with the wooden dialogue, uneven acting, talk of trade embargoes and Midichlorians and the insufferable Jar Jar Binks enshrining it as the worst-reviewed installment yet (a title it still holds to this day), but there is no denying that The Phantom of Menace was the single most highly-anticipated blockbuster in history.