Day two of Studying Star Wars
Early Beginnings of the business and financials of the Star Wars Franchise
Ever since Star Wars first released, the movies have been blockbuster films. The first movie reached $3 million in sales within the first week and $100 million by the end of the summer after it was released. Not only did revenues come from box office sales, but as well as the new merchandising campaign that would launch Star Wars into a household name. Lucas did not settle for just the profits that he was making from Star Wars. He reinvested his profits to step away from the Hollywood scene and develop his own Empire that became Lucas Films and Star Wars.
It almost seems that every Star Wars seqeul of the first trilogy became even more visually advanced with the special effects that were used in the movie. When they first started out Star Wars they only had a production budget of $11 million. This was $3.5 million over budget that 20th Century Fox planned at the beginning of filming.
In order to get the special effects just right, Lucas had a team of artists that very much independently design the Star Wars ships and planets by themselves with the guidance of Lucas. What the documentary Star Wars: Empire of Dream brings to light is how the time spent on creating the Star Wars universe was a direct cause to the success of the film. Star Wars: A New Hope was revolutionary in what had been done in film. With the space battle scenes and the light saber technology, no one had seen special effects they way they were done in the film.
The success of the first movie brought George Lucas and the team behind making the film a profit of around $1.2 billion. It increased 20th Centuries stock by double and proved that George Lucas idea was a true masterpiece. There was still much skepticism about whether the hype around the movie would survive. Many thought it was going to be a one time wonder. This gave Lucas a even greater challenge to provide its fans with a sequel that would capture its audience just as well.
This is where Lucas applied his entrepreneur skills and used his profits form his first Star Wars movie to finance and make the second movie Empire Strikes Back independently. This move gave Lucas the creative freedom to make a movie exactly the way he wanted. This aspect of Lucas’s skills was developed early in age when he opened up a haunted house and kept updating it to keep the neighbor hood kids coming back. Lucas knowledge to work this hard paid off in the end with the following movies being a big success as well.
Much of the revenue also came from new merchandising sales that came in the form of clothing, cereal boxes, and toys. Due to the success of these products, Star Wars quickly became a household name. The use of multimedia allowed George Lucas to be able to target his target market very well by putting Star Wars advertisements on the cereal boxes they see every day.
Lucas created a cycle which turned into the Star Wars franchise that it is today. One of the most recent movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens is now the top movie with a gross domestic revenue of $.93 billion. This shows just how big Lucas’s achievement is. The next question is to see if the next film Star Wars: Episode IX will do just as good in the box office.
