LONDON — In Manila, a 27-year-old ballet dancer named Mika Fabella began weeping as John Williams' orchestral score filled the cinema. In Bangkok, Winyou Sukhumwat, 40, who had made a video of himself posing with a lightsaber, declared, "I feel alive again." In Paris, Jérémy Forges, a 32-year-old security guard, took a day off from work so he could stand in line for five hours to catch the 10 a.m. screening at the sumptuous Grand Rex.
Fans in the Philippines, Thailand and France were among the first in the world to see "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," which began rolling out Wednesday in countries around the world. The movie — the seventh installment in a phenomenal pop-culture franchise that director George Lucas birthed in 1977, had its world premiere in Los Angeles on Monday — but it will not open in wide release in the United States and Canada until Friday.
Like die-hard fans everywhere, they came dressed as Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker (and the occasional Darth Vader and stormtrooper), wielding ubiquitous lightsabers, and reminiscing about their earlier encounters with the Manichaean mythology of the "Star Wars" franchise.
The Walt Disney Co.'s lavish marketing pulled out all the stops for the film, which is expected to take in $2.5 billion in global ticket sales. For the film's British premiere Wednesday evening in Leicester Square in London, Disney set up giant video screens overlooking the red carpet that leads to the Odeon — and even installed a life-size model of the interior of an Imperial starship.
Odeon, the largest cinema chain in Britain, said it had sold more than 500,000 advance tickets, outpacing a record set earlier this year by "Spectre," the latest James Bond movie; Disney reported that more than 200,000 had been sold in the first 24 hours alone.
Ingrid Breul, a publicist for Cinemaxx, one of Germany's largest cinema chains, said that 175,000 advance tickets had been sold, including 40,000 in the first 24 hours — the highest in the company's history. In Germany, "Star Wars" merchandise has been flying off the shelves of toy stores, and one supermarket chain has offered trading cards and collectibles to encourage holiday shopping.
Phiraya Kampho, who works in marketing at one of Thailand's major theater chains, SF Corp., said that bookings had exceeded expectations and had beaten recent
blockbusters like "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2."
Fans around the world seemed to embrace the marketing with gusto. The Odeon cinema chain had banned Darth Vader helmets and unsheathed lightsabers out of safety concerns, so Luciane Alecrim, a 49-year-old from Brazil who waited in line in London for a chance to see stars like Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford on the red carpet, wore her wedding dress — "because I want to marry Harrison Ford today," she said.
Nick Hansen, a 20-year-old from Australia who was also waiting in Leicester Square, found his emotions "hard to put into words," but he said: "Tears are going to be shed everywhere. 'Star Wars' means so much to so many people."
"Star Wars fever" turned up in some surprising places in Germany: A church in Berlin is planning a "Star Wars"-themed service Sunday; the airport in Stuttgart encouraged employees to come dressed as their favorite characters; and a video posted on YouTube imposed Darth Vader onto the facade of the Cologne Cathedral, turned the Fernsehturm television tower in Berlin into a Death Star and transposed the head of R2-D2 onto the dome of the Reichstag.
"I thought it was the coolest," Philipp Karger, a Frankfurt-based artist who made the video, said of his earliest exposure to the "Star Wars" films, in the early 1980s. He likened "the dark side of the Force," the most menacing aspect of the film's ethos, to Nazi ideology.
In the Philippines, a former colony of the United States, American pop culture has a special resonance. Regina Layug-Rosero, a writer and editor in Manila, is part of a group that dresses as stormtroopers to perform at charity events.
"We are big on accuracy," she said. "We get every detail right. It is exactly like the stormtroopers in the movie."
She added that "Filipinos like underdog stories."
Fabella, the ballet dancer, is part of a group that stages carefully choreographed lightsaber matches.
"The enthusiasm was amazing," she said after attending the Manila premiere on Tuesday night. "It felt like I was 6 years old again."
Manny Mendoza, a 47-year-old engineer in Manila and an avid collector of "Star Wars" memorabilia, watched the original film in 1977 and compared "The Force Awakens" to "seeing old friends after a long time."
Mendoza said he had too many "Star Wars" collectibles to count, including toys released in the 1970s. Asked which piece in his collection was the best, he replied: "They are like my children. I can't play favorites."