Fans fete 'Star Wars' on China's Great Wall

At one point 1200 tickets to Australian cinemas were sold in one minute for the movie's premiere showing at midnight sessions on the evening of December 17.

The final "Star Wars" trailer debuted during "Monday Night Football"'s Giants vs. Eagles halftime, which subsequently forced the Internet to have a meltdown faster than .

This undated photo provided by Disney shows the poster for the new film, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens". The company declined to give ticket sales figures for "The Force Awakens", but said it was eight times more than previous record holder, 2011's "The Hunger Games".

Disney spent $4 billion for franchise owner Lucasfilm in 2012, a decision that's looking smarter as its first "Star Wars" movie, the seventh installment in the series, approaches.

Line up The Stormtroopers were on the Great Wall during a promotional event for the new Star Wars film on the outskirts of Beijing

"Last night we had the single biggest simultaneous surge for movie tickets our industry has ever seen", a spokesperson for Alamo Drafthouse said in a statement to NBC News. The websites of both Fandango and MovieTickets.com were working normally by early Tuesday. But its site, too, succumbed for a time, posting this message: "Web server is returning an unknown error".

Overseas, the online ticketing systems of a few cinema chains froze like the plains of Hoth as Star Wars fans tried to get tickets.

It's a similar story of high demand at the AMC Theatres in Inver Grove Heights, which lists eight screenings between the hours of 7 and 8 p.m. on December 17, many of which had only a handful of available seats as of Tuesday. Alamo Drafthouse apologized for the "frustration and disappointment" on after customers were unable to purchase tickets.

Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne said in June that the movie could be the third-highest-grossing film in history. MovieTickets.com did reveal, however, that "The Force Awakens" had accounted for a whopping 95 percent of sales on the site in 24 hours.

Selling tickets two months before a film's debut is a strategy Hollywood has occasionally deployed in the past for its most highly anticipated releases.

Hype aroundThe Force Awakens was heightened with the release of a new trailer that premiered in the United States during the popular Monday night National Football League game.

Many commentators reflected on the absence of key Star Wars characters from the new from the new clip including Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker and everyone's favourite protocol droid, C3PO.