That’s right folks ‘The Force Awakens’ – the latest Star Wars film comes to the UK on December 18, and unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last couple of weeks you’ll have seen lots of merchandise, social media posts and snippets from the movie.
The hype surrounding this movie is insane! The official trailer came out this week and it looks (as you would expect) absolutely amazing. Online ticket sales for the film went through the roof, with websites crashing due to the sheer volumes of people clamouring for tickets.
But let’s go back to that trailer for a moment. The eagle eyed amongst you will have noticed that that some of the scenes in it have been shot right here in Cumbria! A number of the battle scenes were filmed in the Lake District, and in the official trailer X-Wing fighters can be seen flying over Derwentwater!
It’s exciting stuff!
But how does all this help our local economy, well obviously our local Cinemas (Vue and The Roxy) will do incredibly well out of the film, but its impact is much more further reaching than that. As some of the scenes were filmed in Cumbria, tourism will benefit, with fans wanting to see the locations for themselves. It also puts Cumbria firmly on the map for other film companies to come here and take advantage of our fantastic and varied scenery.
Small local businesses will also do well from the film too. Companies like Coopers Collectibles and Atomic Comica (both based in Barrow) will benefit, as we all know - merchandise tends to generate just as much money as the actual films do nowadays, and fans will be snapping up action figures, toys, comics and graphic novels while they can.
So, will I watch the film?
Of course, I’m a huge Star Wars fan... although I haven’t booked my tickets yet, so I may have to wait a while to get to see it!
