The Myth of the “Low-Budget” Star Wars
The first Star Wars was made for $11 million dollars. That sounds pretty cheap, but what does that number really mean?
On May 25, 2022, Susana Polo wrote an article for Polygon titled Make Star Wars Cheap Again. It’s a fantastic read, one which I whole-heartedly agree with in terms of how it depicts the current state of the franchise (although, Polo’s suggestion that Disney “make an entire movie in The Volume was unfortunately proven very wrong by Obi Wan Kenobi). In my opinion, the article nails the issues not only facing Star Wars, but Hollywood franchise-making as a whole. With rising costs only likely to climb higher with the current economic situation, it’d behoove studios to trade off spectacle with profit, albeit in a way which promotes creative freedom.
Though, there’s one element to the article which is intriguing: the idea that the first Star Wars movie, released in 1977, was a low budget picture. While Polo uses this information to support her thesis, in recent years a significant number of internet fans interpret this as proof that the original Star Wars was some incomprehensible achievement. How could anyone capture the magic of George Lucas’s masterpiece? Others have tried and failed, spending hundreds of millions in the process. 1977’s Star Wars captured the zeitgeist of a film industry which has radically changed over the past 50 years, but if one delves into the Hollywood of the 1970s, our understanding of what made a movie “low budget” at the time becomes a bit murkier.
With that in mind, let’s start with some background. In 1973, George Lucas’s had a surprise hit in his hands with the semi-autobiographical American Graffiti. Despite having a budget of well under a million dollars, the movie made a hundred times at the international box office by appealing to both the art crowd and breezy theatergoer alike. As a result, Lucas transformed into one of Hollywood’s golden boys overnight, joining the ranks of his pals Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Brian DePalma. Lucas needed the break; Warner Brothers had distributed his first film two years prior, a sci-fi thriller named THX 1138, that flopped at the box office. With the goodwill of Graffiti fresh in the minds of studio executives, he could finally pitch his dream project: a sci-fi epic, something he could use to displace the limitations of film and genre. It wouldn’t be cheap. Even with the shawl of THX’s failure hanging over Lucas, Star Wars commanded a budget seven times as large as both his previous films’ combined.
We have a somewhat definitive statement on the cost of the first Star Wars from Gary Kurtz, Lucas’s friend and producer on the series until The Empire Strikes Back. In a 2002 interview with gaming outlet IGN, Kurtz said that he and Lucas wanted the movie to be “low-budget, Roger Corman style, and the budget was never going to be more than — well, originally we had proposed about 8 million [dollars]”.
For readers unfamiliar with the Hollywood icon, Corman was perhaps the best-known producer of schlocky, low-budget B films until his semi-retirement in the late 2000s. In fact, he’d given George’ Lucas’s pal Francis Ford Coppola his first film in 1963, a psychological horror piece named Dementia 13. Although, Star Wars had a higher budget than any of Corman’s projects at the time; his films typically cost just over half a million dollars. As Kurtz later clarified in the same IGN interview, Star War’s budget ballooned to, “9.8 or .9 or something like that” once the film ran into production delays. This aligns close to the official budget reported on Box Office Mojo of 11 million dollars, a number further supported by David Pirie’s 1981 book Anatomy of the Movies.
And, actually, Lucas knew that Star Wars had a large budget — larger than the franchise absolutely needed. In 1976, possibly before cameras started rolling on A New Hope, Lucas briefed sci-fi novelist Alan Dean Foster on his plans for the franchise if the first film flopped. He needed Foster to conceive a story which could reuse assets made for the first film and stay cheap; this story later became the first Expanded Universe novel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. Should he need, this would allow Lucas to continue the franchise- and its merchandising opportunities- if studios rejected a sequel on the scale of the first film.
However, these were movie studios emboldened by the success of Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s whale (shark) of a success. While green-lit by the studio for a paltry $3.5 million, the difficulties of a film shooting a film on water inflated the cost to nearly triple Universal’s original investment. That confidence paid off; while Jaw’s cost twice as much as the year’s other top-earners, by the end of 1976 it was the highest grossing film of all time. Other studios leapt at the chance to harvest their own pop-culture phenomenon, a fever which heralded Hollywood’s “age of the B-movie”. For 20th Century Fox, the stars (pun intended) aligned. Despite threats to shutter Lucas’s production several times throughout filming, the release of Star Wars in May of 1977 caught like a wildfire. It quickly overtook Jaws as the worldwide box office’s top earner. From these successes, other film studios drew a misleading conclusion- higher budgets and complicated productions correlated to higher returns.
This contradicted the lessons learned from the first half of the decade, a time in which either cheap highbrow or cheap lowbrow fare brought the highest return to a studio. As anyone who’s studied the period knows, the 70s were an era characterized by extremes. In the same year as Star Wars, only four of the other top grossing films had a comparable budget: A Bridge Too Far (the most expensive, at $25 million), The Spy Who Loved Me ($13.5 million), The Deep ($9 million) and Steven Spielberg s Close Encounters of the Third Kind ($19 million). As with Jaws, Spielberg reportedly undersold the film to the studio with a promised budget of $2.7 million. He only started increasing the budget exponentially after Columbia Pictures inked their deal with him. Again, Spielberg narrowly avoided a disaster when Encounters, buoyed by the interest in Sci-Fi generated by Star Wars, performed above expectations. But A Bridge Too Far, the most expensive of these three films, only doubled its budget (as opposed to the tenfold of other movies that year). Meanwhile, hits from Smokey and the Bandit to Saturday Night Fever cost less than $5 million- especially when subtracting the upfront salaries given to their stars.
This dichotomy also held true the previous year. The biggest film, Rocky, cost United Artists less than a million due to the obscurity of its cast and crew. The same can’t be said for the runner up, Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson’s country- flecked A Star is Born, made for $6 million. Carrie, which Brian DePalma prepped alongside Lucas (even screen-testing the same actors), earned over $30 million off a budget of less than $2 million. In fact, this same pattern of low cost-high returns holds as far back as 1973 when American Graffiti burst onto the streets; while the biggest film of a year may have cost over ten million dollars, the second and third were half as expensive and twice as profitable. Within this context, it becomes clear that Star Wars commanded quite a high budget in comparison.
Why, then, does Gary Kurtz claim that Star Wars was “low budget by Hollywood standards at the time.” Well, he isn’t necessarily wrong.
I know I just spent the last ten paragraphs laying out all this evidence that 1977’s Star Wars was pretty well funded. But Kurtz’s quote omits an essential piece of information: the first Star Wars was low budget in comparison to the second Star Wars- as well as nearly every blockbuster which came after it.
The first casualty of this industry inflation was Star Trek: the Motion Picture, a film which Paramount ironically wanted George Lucas to direct in its early stages. The studio wasted millions on failed proposals up to its 1979 release, including a new television series known as Phase II. When Star Wars suddenly became the franchise’s top rival, the studio retrofitted the pilot of this new series into The Motion Picture. After a burning a further $10–15 million on incapable VFX companies, the final budget for Star Trek topped $44 million. Unlike Star Wars, these expenditures proved unwarranted. Trek earned a paltry $139 million-175 million internationally, leading Paramount into a restrained take on the franchise for its 1982 follow-up, The Wrath of Khan. By then, other sci fi films dwarfed the $12 million allotted to Khan, including both Star Wars sequels. The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi both cost upwards of $30 million, a combined sum six to seven times larger than the budget for the first film in the trilogy. Attempts from other studios followed suit. Columbia Pictures’ 1983 knock-off Krull cost $30 million but earned half its budget on release. Universal’s Dune fared only a little better the next year, barely recouping the cost of its $40 million production (which did not include the money pit dug by the Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ridley Scott attempts before it).
Lucas’s own ventures to recapture Star Wars met varying degrees of success. The Indiana Jones franchise, his only other true hit, saw their budgets double over the course of the 1980s. The $20 million spent on Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 became $48 million by 1989’s The Last Crusade. Each film in the franchise returned their investment aplenty, but the same can’t be said for Lucas’s other frivolities. These include 1988’s Willow, Lucasfilm’s $35 million fantasy epic with a mere $130 million gross, or the $25 million spent on the David Bowie-led disaster Labyrinth. From one project with a pop-star to another, Lucas also produced Michael Jackson’s Captain EO, a film which released exclusively as an attraction at Walt Disney Theme Parks. Relatively, it put the budgets of every other film mentioned to shame. Despite its 17 minute runtime, the Captain EO cost $23 million to make, or $1.35 million per minute. While drawing in crowds for over a decade, EO’s still seen today as a prime example of unnecessary excess. With variable returns, this new wave of B movies ventured questions which made the new Hollywood uncomfortable. The industry had reason to keep the faith, though — even with their occasional disaster, a George Lucas or Steven Spielberg backed-movie still topped the box office from the 1980 to 1985. No two other filmmakers have since maintained this sort of dynasty.
Yet, this is a dramatic presentation of a select few Hollywood films. Several films in the wake of Star Wars kept their budgets in check, hitting that $10–15 million sweet spot. The other big sci-fi film in 1979 (besides Diseny’s $20 million disappointment The Black Hole) was Alien, the rare film which cost a fourth of Star Trek’s budget while still managing to gross over $100 million. While Ridley Scott’s follow-up Blade Runner cost twice as much and made half that, the Alien franchise remained secure. Armed with an $18 million budget (which meant considerably less due to rampant inflation in the late 70s), in 1986 James Cameron exceeded the financial success of the first film with his bombastic follow-up, Aliens. Switching gears, Universal Pictures achieved greater success on a similar budget the previous year due to their retro futuristic romp Back to the Future, the last science fiction film to top the box office until 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Then, for a number of years, blockbusters with low concepts and high profile stars seemed like the way to go for maximum profitability; it’s the recipe which allowed Fatal Attraction, Three Men and a Baby, and Top Gun to thrive in years with heavy franchise competition. Of course, the beginning of the 90s shifted the industry rapidly. In 1991, the aforementioned Terminator 2 would break the budget soft cap for a film with its $100 million expenses. Since a film that expensive could turn a profit (especially from an independent studio, with now-defunct Carolco footing the bill), Hollywood felt emboldened to follow suit. The biggest films started to cost between $50–100 million. In 2022, that’s $100–200 million, meaning that the highest grossing (and for the most part, franchise-less) films cost the same as a Marvel movie. Case in point: Cameron would break the budget soft-cap again with his purported 200 million dollar budget for Titanic, an eye-watering number which Hollywood balks at even today for all but the biggest films. He would spend marginally more on Avatar ($237 million) over a decade later.
When George Lucas finally circled back to his lucrative cradle, he recognized the futility of competing with Cameron. He spent half of the budget Titanic had on Star Wars: Episode 1– The Phantom Menace, and it made about half of Titanic’s haul at the box office. Despite the decade long hype cycle, Star Wars wasn’t the brand it used to be. In 1977, the name alone diminished the ranks of its contemporaries, leaving them in obscurity. By the time of Revenge of the Sith- Lucas’s last Star Wars movie- Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings had usurped its place as the biggest film franchises in the world. Each of those films cost as much as a Star Wars film at the time, and both of their sequel series- The Hobbit and Fantastic Beasts, respectively- cost twice as much. That’s cheap; Avatar: The Way of Water has set Disney back $250 million, with its release finally on the horizon. Even that number pales in comparison to the nearly $700 million allotted to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, a figure which discounts the comparable amounts burned through their marketing campaigns. In a sense, the scale of 1977’s Star Wars has become an impossibility for modern Hollywood. The systems which have been established in the 50 years since preclude cheaper options. Modest sci-fi efforts like Brad Pitt’s 2019 film Ad Astra also require astronomical budgets to remain viable in a competitive field. Meanwhile, Disney’s efforts to min-max the Star Wars brand has produced variable results. An experimental series like Star Wars: Visions commanded critical respect and a second season, while Obi Wan Kenobi (with its rumored $90 million budget) resulted in a mixed bag. Now, the future of Star Wars as a film franchise hangs in the balance, but one thing is certain: it won’t be cheap.
