Rod Hilton, creator of the aforementioned Machete Order, in December 2015 just as The Force Awakens was released:
Wow, this Machete Order thing got big! After the post first "went viral" and got mentioned on Wired.com, I started getting around 2,000 visitors to it per day, which I thought was a lot. But then in the months before Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was released, it blew up like Alderaan, peaking at 50,000 visitors DAILY. This year, over 1.5 million unique users visited the page. It’s been nuts.
This sort of thing happens on my blog as well. I have several posts that get tons of seasonal traffic. A few examples are my wireless GoPro file transfer tips, when an NFL game goes into overtime, and my thoughts on Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm. There are a ton more too. I believe my all-time record for a single day’s traffic on a single post was 11,700+ views. So no where near what Hilton gets. These posts get thousands and thousands of hits some weeks and nearly zero others. I think it is fun. I don’t engineer my blog for these types of things.
I’d bet Hilton’s blog is getting hit yet again with the release of The Last Jedi.