So this morning at 8h00 am the tickets for Star Wars The Force Awakens went on sale across the UK. Although we at CloneCorridor checked last night to see any signs of an impending sale happening it wasn’t until earlier this morning when Odeon Cinema’s tweeted they would open the mystery box of ticket sales today.

As the Telegraph reported Vue, Cineworld and Odeon went on sale at 8h am and from our own experience we can confirm that almost all their servers went into a virtual stand-still. The same was true for the PictureHouse website. We are now well into the afternoon and traffic on these sites is still very sluggish. I called the Odeon customer service helpline at 12h30 only to hear confirmed that they weren’t able to take the calls due to the large demand for Star Wars The Force Awakens tickets. Also the Evening Standard confirms the meltdown of the online reservation systems.

A quick survey across nearby Europe:

In the Netherlands Pathe Cinema’s will be showing The Force Awakens from Wednesday the 16th onwards in the early morning hours (10h am in Utrecht for example) but good luck trying to get them … the online reservation system is down!

In Germany various individual cinema’s have started their sales in a rather ad hoc way. After initial information suggested sales would not start until one or two weeks from now several cinema’s, and increasingly also chains of cinema’s, have started selling tickets as on 9h am local time this morning. Star Wars fans in Germany are trying to keep an overview.

In Belgium pre-sales have also started for The Force Awakens, here to tickets are sold for shows opening as early as December the 16th at 10h am. Apparently the news has not yet reached many over there as sales are relatively slow at the moment and online reservations are easilly possible.

If you have reports from your country, please feel free to add those in the comments section!

Update 14h15: A major UK cinema chain has reported The Force Awakes is the movie in 2015 that so far has the fastest selling of advance tickets.

http://www.nme.com/filmandtv/news/uk-cinema-chain-says-star-wars-the-force-awakens-h/390677

Update 15h00: The BBC & CNN now also report on the emerging phenomenon.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-34571070

http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/19/media/star-wars-movie-tickets/

http://www.flickeringmyth.com/2015/10/star-wars-the-force-awakens-advance-ticket-sales-setting-records.html