tags: Star Wars Geek Useless Knwoledge
Celebrating this movie franchise is in some ways very special to me.
The first movie came out in 1977 - my birth year - and here are some useless facts.
I'll try to provide sources but I did no thorough research 1 2 3
Sold 137,786,483 tickets during the original theatrical release
It played for a stunning of 343 days!
The tickets to population ration was 40,8 % (US & Canada)
In some places people watching the movie directly got back in line to watch it again
Funny thing Star Wars IV was only released in 32 (opening day) / 43 (opening weekend) theaters on the first weekend.
Initially not a lot of theaters wanted to show the movie - people were bored with ScFi flicks - which were flooded beforehand with a bunch of bad B-Movies. But this drastically changed in the following weeks!
As a lot of you know initially the second trilogy parts were shown (Episode IV - VI) - I will not cover Episode I - III because they are the worst (my opinion... don't try to convince me)
While the fist one (A new hope - IV) initially cost 11 million it made a whopping 775 million in revenue! 4
Empire strikes back - V cost 18 million to make and made 538 million in revenue
Return of the Jedi - VI cost 32 million and made 475 million in revenue
Totaling the first three entries at 1,788 billion $
30th of October 2012 George Lucas and Disney confirmed that the Star Wars franchise was sold for a whooping 4,05 billion $ 5
Lets just say you own something and already have a bunch of cash made from this, and then someone (or in this case Disney) drops by and says "Hey I would like to buy the rights to this!" - how do you react - how do you put a price tag on this ... and what in the world do you do with 4,05 billion $ ?!?!
Star Wars will be with us for the coming years - in one form or the other. While the new movies (Episode I - III and VII - IX) cannot live up to the initial hits they are still a juggernaut in the movie industry. The current approach from Disney - delivering Series is also a great way to include smaller stories.
https://www.in70mm.com/presents/1963_blow_up/titel/s/star_wars/index.htm ↩
https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/epmqia/the_amount_of_tickets_sold_for_each_star_wars/ ↩
https://stephen-tracy.medium.com/analyzing-40-years-of-star-wars-box-office-success-and-the-future-of-cinema-de4a766a6a02 ↩
https://www.statista.com/statistics/311356/star-wars-production-costs-box-office-revenue/ ↩