On 14 December 2015, the seventh instalment in the Star Wars franchise, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, premiered in Los Angeles. Highly anticipated as the first instalment since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, the film was positioned within the wider media discourse as an attempt to reinvigorate the franchise after the relative critical failure of the earlier prequel trilogy. On a budget estimated to be $200 million, considerably higher than the $11 million spent on the 1977 original, the film was a substantial commercial success - grossing over $750 million within twenty days of release, and swiftly becoming the highest-grossing film of all time in North America (McClintock 2016). Nevertheless, while the overall critical reaction was positive, the film received a significant amount of negative criticism focusing on its many resemblances to the first film in the franchise. From Vox's list of ‘Five ways the new movie copies the original film’ (VanDerWerff 2015) to Geek Crusade's ‘Eighteen ways The Force Awakens ripped off A New Hope’ (Jun Heng 2015), there was a considerable amount of online commentary that positioned The Force Awakens less as a new instalment in a developing franchise than as a ‘rip-off’ of the original film. Even director J. J. Abrams acknowledged this reaction, admitting in an interview that ‘I can understand that someone might say, “Oh, it's a complete rip-off!”’ (McMillan 2016) in reference to the various ways the film paid homage to the George Lucas original.