{"id":13988,"date":"2012-01-11T21:01:21","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T21:01:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=13988"},"modified":"2016-01-05T04:47:49","modified_gmt":"2016-01-05T04:47:49","slug":"the-cost-of-star-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2012\/01\/11\/the-cost-of-star-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cost of Star Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"
How much did Star Wars<\/a><\/strong> (1977) cost to make?<\/p>\n A quick Wikipedia search<\/a> tells us that the budget was $11m.<\/p>\n But what if we wanted to dig a little deeper?<\/p>\n Browsing an old bookstore, I came across Joel Finler’s The Hollywood Story<\/a>\u00a0which reprinted a breakdown of the Star Wars budget.<\/p>\n This in itself was reprinted from David Pirie’s Anatomy of the Movies<\/a>, which in turn was presuambly sourced from a 20th Century Fox or Lucasfilm financial statement.<\/p>\n It is worth noting that these figures would have been from 1980 – before the dollars from home video and merchandising really began to flow.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n [Click here for a larger version<\/a>]<\/p>\n There are a few things that stand out:<\/p>\n As of 2008, the overall box office revenue generated by the six Star Wars films is around $4.41 billion.<\/p>\n Only the Harry Potter and James Bond franchises have grossed more.<\/p>\n Aside from making George Lucas a lot of money, their other creative legacy is the creation of ILM<\/a>, the company founded to create the visual effects for the movies.<\/p>\n For example, the opening shot of Star Wars took eight months and Lucas wanted people who could use the power of computers to help make the process easier.<\/p>\n Lucas hired Ed Catmull, who was in charge of the computer division at Lucasfilm and Alvy Ray Smith, who became head of the graphics project there.<\/p>\n When Lucas sold this computer graphics division to Steve Jobs in 1986, the former Apple boss (who would eventually return in 1997) renamed the company Pixar.<\/p>\n It would eventually go on to make animation history with a series of pioneering short films, Toy Story (1995) and a series of Oscar-winning and box office triumphs.<\/p>\n But for more on that, story check out the history of Pixar<\/a>.<\/p>\n > Star Wars at Wikipedia<\/a> How much did the first Star Wars film cost to make? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13989,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,16],"tags":[115],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13988"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13988"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16305,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13988\/revisions\/16305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n> Skillset breakdown of film finances<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"