When a franchise such as Star Wars is so pervasive in popular culture, it is hard to imagine it once being just a spark of an idea. Star Wars came about because creator George Lucas failed to get the film rights to Flash Gordan. A failure turned out to be a big opportunity to create something original, which would go on to become multiple movies, television series, books and more. These days, Disney, not Lucas, is steering the Millennium Falcon but before we get into all that, let’s take a deeper look at Star Wars’ beginnings.
George Lucas’ big idea
In 1971, Lucas began developing his own space opera. Riding the success of his 1973 film American Graffiti, which featured Harrison Ford, he started to pitch his space film around. Both United Artists and Universal rejected it. 20th Century Fox decided to take a chance on Lucas’ 12 page synopsis. It would take Lucas and creative partner Gary Kurtz several drafts and rewrites to get things right.
Lucas was passionate about this project and wanted to give the world a way to escape and expand their imaginations. “The reason I’m making Star Wars is that I want to give young people some sort of faraway exotic environment for their imaginations to run around in. I have a strong feeling about interesting kids in space exploration. I want them to want it. I want them to get beyond the basic stupidities of the moment and think about colonizing Venus and Mars. And the only way it’s going to happen is to have some dumb kid fantasize about it — to get his ray gun, jump in his ship and run off with this wookie into outer space. It’s our only hope in a way,” Lucas mused in an early interview.
Although Fox financed the original film, they did not have high hopes for its success and gave it an extremely low budget. Lucas had asked for $18 million, Fox gave him $7.5. Star Wars’s final tab was $11 million but it went on to gross more than $513 million worldwide during its original release in 1977. This would turn out to be just the beginning, Lucas would go on to make 5 more films and create his own film company Lucasfilm. To say he was successful is a gross understatement.
Lucas’ reasons for selling
Lucas’ success did not come without a cost, as it was a massive amount of hard work, and he has a bit of a reputation for being a micromanager. He demands to be involved at every stage. Because of this, he sacrificed family time. As he got older, he began to want a better work-life balance and to spend time with his daughter.
“In 2012, I was 69… So the question was am I going to keep doing this the rest of my life? Do I want to go through this again? Finally, I decided I’d rather raise my daughter and enjoy life for a while,” he stated.
Lucas decided to approach Disney to see if they wanted to take over and buy Lucasfilm. It was a deal Mickey Mouse himself could not pass up.
The big deal
Many were shocked by this deal. Leonard Maltin, a famous film critic, was worried about the future of the franchise. “There’s no way of telling where this is going to go at this point. Obviously, Disney, as they did with Marvel, is investing in a bluechip property that will yield dividends for years to come. But it’s not a fresh property. It remains to be seen if they revive the characters. There are a lot of unanswered questions,” he mused.
Peter Sealey, a former executive at Columbia Pictures, was not surprised. “George Lucas was never a part of Hollywood, he was always an outlier who left for northern California as soon as he had a hit,” Sealey stated.”So this is an end of an era, the story of a brilliant filmmaker who had one incredibly long home run. This was the only exit strategy he really had. He never wanted to grow the company.”
George, for his part, was ready to hand over his lightsabers. “For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next. It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers,” he wrote in a statement.
Disney was equally happy to take them. “This is one of the great entertainment properties of all time, one of the best branded and one of the most valuable, and it’s just fantastic for us to have the opportunity to both buy it, run it and grow it,” stated Bob Iger, Disney CEO.
Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion dollars plus stock options. Lucas received 40 million Disney shares making him the second-largest non-institutional shareholder behind Steve Jobs.
He retired from his company but does consult every once in an Endor moon. According to Distractify, he was the one to come up with the idea of Anakin Skywalker having a padawan and even named them Ahsoka. The force is still strong with Lucas even if he is now in his own galaxy, far, far away.