Star Wars

• 1. A New Hope Arrives

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  Star Wars arrived in cinemas on the 25th of May 1977, with almost no one expecting what came next. 20th Century Fox had given the film a relatively low budget and moved production to Elstree Studios in England to cut costs. The studio anticipated limited financial success. Within three weeks of the release, Fox's stock price doubled to a record high. Prior to 1977, the studio's greatest annual profits were $37 million. That year, it posted $79 million.

  George Lucas had originally wanted to film an adaptation of the Flash Gordon serial, but could not obtain the rights. After directing American Graffiti in 1973, he wrote a two-page synopsis that Fox agreed to finance. By 1974 he had expanded it into a first screenplay draft. The film he eventually made changed how Hollywood thought about movies, audiences, and money.

  The original film was later retitled Episode IV: A New Hope, a designation first appearing in the 1979 book The Art of Star Wars. Its success set Lucas on a path he had not fully charted: he decided the story would become the basis of an elaborate film serial, a trilogy of trilogies. That ambition would take decades to complete, and the franchise it produced would become one of the highest-grossing in cinematic history.

• 2. The Skywalker Saga Unfolds

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  The nine films at the heart of Star Wars are collectively called the Skywalker Saga, and they were produced in a deliberately non-chronological order. The original trilogy, released between 1977 and 1983, was followed by the prequel trilogy between 1999 and 2005, and then the sequel trilogy between 2015 and 2019.

  Each trilogy tracks a generation of the Force-sensitive Skywalker family against the recurring threat of the Sith lord Palpatine. Luke Skywalker's arc drives the originals. The prequels tell the backstory of his father Anakin, who is seduced to the dark side by Palpatine and becomes Darth Vader. Lucas has referred to the first six episodic films together as "the tragedy of Darth Vader." The sequels follow the conflict between Leia's son Ben Solo and a young Jedi named Rey, and their eventual alliance against a returned Palpatine.

  Lucas confirmed in 1980 that he had the nine-film series plotted, though by 1981 he had decided to cancel further sequels due to the stress of producing the originals. Technical advances in CGI in the late 1980s and early 1990s drew him back. In January 2012 he announced he would make no more Star Wars films, and that October the Walt Disney Company agreed to buy Lucasfilm. Lucas provided story treatments for the sequels during the sale, but by 2015 that outline had been discarded. All nine saga films were nominated for Academy Awards; Oscars went to the first three releases.

  The Force Awakens, released on the 18th of December 2015, and The Last Jedi, released on the 15th of December 2017, were both critical and box office successes. The Rise of Skywalker, released on the 20th of December 2019, received a mixed reception from critics and audiences.

• 3. A Universe in Print and Audio

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  Star Wars in print predates the first film's release. The novelization appeared in November 1976, credited to Lucas but ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster. The first Expanded Universe story appeared in Marvel Comics' Star Wars #7 in January 1978, followed by Foster's sequel novel Splinter of the Mind's Eye the following month.

  Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, published between 1991 and 1993, reignited wide interest in the franchise. The first novel, Heir to the Empire, reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller list. It introduced characters including Grand Admiral Thrawn, Mara Jade, Talon Karrde, and Gilad Pellaeon. Del Rey took over Star Wars book publishing in 1999, releasing a 19-installment series called The New Jedi Order between 1999 and 2003. That series introduced the Yuuzhan Vong, an alien race attempting to invade and conquer the galaxy. The multi-author Legacy of the Force series, published between 2006 and 2008, chronicles the crossover of Han and Leia's son Jacen Solo to the dark side; among his acts, he kills Luke's wife Mara Jade as a sacrifice to join the Sith.

  On the audio side, the first Star Wars audio work was The Story of Star Wars, an LP using audio samples from the original film released in 1977. Lucas licensed the Star Wars radio rights to KUSC-FM, the NPR-affiliated campus radio station of his alma mater the University of Southern California. The first radio adaptation was written by Brian Daley and broadcast on National Public Radio in 1981, adapting the original film into 13 episodes. Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels reprised their roles. Its overwhelming success led to a 10-episode adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back, which debuted in 1983 and was joined by Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian.

• 4. Games, Comics, and Merchandise

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  According to Marvel Comics' former Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter, strong sales of Star Wars comics saved Marvel financially in 1977 and 1978. Marvel's Star Wars series was one of the industry's top-selling titles in 1979 and 1980. The first officially licensed electronic Star Wars game was Kenner's 1979 table-top Star Wars Electronic Battle Command. Parker Brothers published the first Star Wars video game for the Atari 2600 in 1982, and a rail shooter arcade game followed from Atari in 1983, using vector graphics to replicate the Death Star trench run from the 1977 film.

  Lucasfilm founded its own video game division in 1982, and later created LucasArts as a dedicated developer. In 1993, LucasArts released Star Wars: X-Wing, the first self-published Star Wars video game and the franchise's first space flight simulator. It was one of the bestselling video games of 1993. Dark Forces in 1995 introduced the first Star Wars first-person shooter and featured a custom-designed game engine called the Jedi. The franchise has since spawned over one hundred computer, video, and board games.

  Merchandising has been equally vast. While filming the original 1977 film, Lucas took a $500,000 pay cut to his director's salary in exchange for full ownership of the franchise's merchandising rights. By 1987, the first three films had made billions in merchandising revenue. By 2012, the first six films produced approximately further billions. Kenner Products made the first Star Wars action figures to coincide with the release of the original film. Star Wars was the first intellectual property to be licensed in Lego history. Trading cards have been published since the first "blue" series by Topps in 1977, with some rare promotional cards from the 1993 Galaxy Series II commanding $1,000 or more on the collector's market.

• 5. Historical Echoes and Archetypes

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  George Lucas drew extensively from history and mythology when building the Star Wars universe. Darth Vader's design was initially inspired by Samurai armor and incorporated a German military helmet. Lucas originally conceived of the Sith as a group serving the Emperor in the same way the Schutzstaffel served Adolf Hitler, but this was condensed into one character in the form of Vader. Stormtroopers borrow the name of World War I German shock troopers. Imperial officers wear uniforms resembling those of German forces during World War II, and political officers resemble the black-clad SS down to stylized silver death's head insignia on their caps.

  Planet names also carry historical weight. Kessel is a term referring to a group of encircled forces. Hoth takes its name from a German general who served on the snow-laden Eastern Front. Palpatine's rise from chancellor to emperor alludes to Hitler's path before appointing himself Fuhrer. Lucas has also drawn parallels to Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Richard Nixon. The Great Jedi Purge mirrors the Night of the Long Knives, and the corruption of the Galactic Republic is modeled after the fall of the democratic Roman Republic.

  The saga draws equally from mythology. Lucas built each character's arc around the hero's journey, an archetypical template developed by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. A defining step of that cycle is "Atonement with the Father". Luke's discovery that Vader is his father is regarded as one of the most influential plot twists in cinema history. Anakin was conceived of a virgin birth and is assumed to be a messianic "Chosen One," though unlike Christ he falls from grace. George Lucas has stated that the central theme of the entire saga is redemption.

• 6. Impact on Hollywood and Culture

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  Film critic Roger Ebert placed Star Wars alongside The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane as technical watersheds that influenced many of the movies that followed. Before 1977, special effects in Hollywood films had not appreciably advanced since the 1950s. The commercial success of Star Wars created a boom in state-of-the-art effects in the late 1970s. Along with Jaws, it started the tradition of the summer blockbuster, where films open simultaneously on many screens and profitable franchises take priority.

  The impact on 20th Century Fox alone was transformative. The franchise helped shift the studio from near bankruptcy to a thriving media conglomerate. Star Wars also created the model for major film trilogies and demonstrated that merchandising rights on a film could generate more money than the film itself.

  Not everyone celebrated the shift. Critic Peter Biskind argued that Lucas and Spielberg "returned the 1970s audience, grown sophisticated on a diet of European and New Hollywood films, to the simplicities of the pre-1960s Golden Age of movies." Tom Shone offered the opposing view: that Star Wars and Jaws "plugged cinema back into the grid, returning the medium to its roots as a carnival sideshow, a magic act." Lucas's concept of a "used universe" particularly influenced Ridley Scott's Blade Runner in 1982 and Alien in 1979, James Cameron's Aliens in 1986 and The Terminator in 1984, George Miller's Mad Max 2 in 1981, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy between 2001 and 2003.

  The Library of Congress selected the original Star Wars for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry in 1989, citing its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance. The Empire Strikes Back was selected in 2010, and Return of the Jedi followed in 2021. In December 2025, a 1977 painting that introduced the world to Star Wars sold for $3.875 million at Heritage Auctions, becoming the most expensive piece of Star Wars memorabilia ever sold.