Star Wars has made 69.4 billion dollars.
- 42 billion off merchandise.
- 10.3 billion at the box office.
- 9 billion off home media.
- 5 billion off video games.
- 1.8 billion off books.
- 950 million off TV.
Which, just for comparison, Star Wars launched in 1977 and has made way more over Star Trek, which made 11 billion and launched in 1966.
It is the highest grossing sci-fi franchise ever and fifth highest grossing franchise of all time, behind Pokémon, Hello Kitty, Winnie the Pooh & Mickey Mouse.
Wanted to figure out what makes Star Wars so different and the reason for the success over the last 46 years.
Here’s what I got.
Reason One-George Lucas leadership
One thing about most creative people is they rarely like to compromise.
Peter Jackson was adamant against letting people making alternative adaptations of Lord of the Rings.
JK Rowling has refused requests to let people license Harry Potter for spin-off books and demanded to screen write Fantastic Beasts as the spin-off movies.
Stephen King disliked Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Shining so much, he created a mini series to tell the story more similar to the book.
Pamela Travers was so against a Mary Poppin’s movie, there’d end up being a movie telling the story about how difficult she was.
Stephen Hillenburg hated the idea of a SpongeBob spin-off series so much, Paramount waited until after he passed away to make one.
A lot of writers/directors are extremely picky on their franchises and will make decisions which cost them money, for artistic integrity.
George Lucas for better or worse is not one of those creators.
He didn’t create episode five, which was the first sequel to Star Wars.
He told toy companies to come up with any random alien design they wanted and put the Star Wars logo on it if it’d sell.
He created an expanded universe for authors to write content for the franchise outside the films, which very rarely he ever did any oversight on.
It might not always lead to the best work, but does lead to the most money.
The reason likely had to do with how George Lucas got control of Star Wars.
He sold the rights to the movie originally in order to get it made, but cut his salary directing it to get merchandise rights.
It worked and his mindset of treating Star Wars as a startup company over a movie series was a key for success.
Reason Two-Action based merchandise
Star Trek came first, but didn’t have the same level of action that could be merchandised as Star Wars.
Star Wars off different designs for ships made billions with deals such as Lego.
Also, created the concept of light sabers, which on a merchandise level is comparable to Harry Potter with wands, giving kids a visible toy.
Which a lot of Star Wars merchandise almost happened by accident.
George Lucas originally planned for lightsabers to only be red, blue & green.
Samuel L Jackson requested a purple one, saying he thought it’d look cool.
George Lucas made his saber purple in post production and ended up having writers create an entire lore for the colors, a series of colors and that one decision alone for multiple colors to sell over half a billion dollars in multi colored sabers.
There’s also characters like BB8 in the sequel series, where Disney licensed the design to a startup called Sphero which had a similar looking product that did 2 million in revenue and sold 100 million of the BB8 toy a year after episode seven came out.
- Droids
- Ships
- Blasters
- Sabers
The franchise has a lot of creative ways to sell merchandise, where other franchises like Star Trek get sweaters and fake plastic ears.
Reason Three-International
Star Wars came out in 1977.
It was the highest grossing movie of that year, making 195 million dollars in the United States.
The second highest grossing movie that year was another sci-fi film, with Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, making 166 million.
Those numbers are very close, but internationally, there was a big gap.
Close Encounters made 306 million globally.
Star Wars made 775 million.
Star Wars & Close Encounters both were sci-fi movies that made about the same domestically, but internationally, it wasn’t even close, where Star Wars was the number one movie in Europe, Latin America and others places, where it’d make 60 million in Japan alone.
The reason being is more sci-fi was heavily actor driven, where Star Wars relying more on special effects let people of other groups have something else to admire.
Final thoughts
There’s a lot to this, where end of the day, it could just be the first trilogy was a really good movie set, which got the franchise off to a good start.
That said though, there’s a bit more to it and a cool history.