'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' returns to Philippine cinemas

MANILA, Philippines - In response to deafening clamor from fans, Lucasfilm's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" will return to regular Philippine cinemas on Friday, January 8.

The film was out of the local cinemas after it gave way to the annual Metro Manila Film Festival, which features strictly local films.

“The Force Awakens” has been showered universal praise, even garnering a Best Picture nomination from America's Broadcast Film Critics Association. It has shattered box office records since it hit theaters worldwide in mid-December.

Most recently, the seventh film in the Star Wars saga blew past the domestic grosses of both “Jurassic World” ($652.3 million) and “Titanic” ($658.7 million) to become the second-highest earner of all time with $740.3 million in just 19 days of release.

Just a week ago, Disney announced that “The Force Awakens” had become the studio's highest grossing film of all time in terms of domestic box office, surpassing Marvel superhero film "The Avengers" from 2012.

The meteoric rise of “The Force Awakens” is particularly notable, given that it took the film only 13 days to pass the total gross of “The Avengers” over its entire run in US theaters.

Internationally, “The Force Awakens” is currently the seventh highest-grossing film of all time with almost $1.4 billion in ticket sales so far.

However, the film has yet to open in China, the second largest market in the world — meaning that it’s likely to get a big boost when it premieres there on January 9.

The film stars Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew and Max Von Sydow. Kathleen Kennedy, J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk are producing with Tommy Harper and Jason McGatlin serving as executive producers. The screenplay is by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt.

"Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures through Columbia Pictures.