THE STAR WARS ECONOMY IS BIGGER THAN YOU THINK: Chris Taylor, author of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise is featured in a new interview at Reason TV:
Taylor says, up until the release of Star Wars: A New Hope, merchandising never worked out for the movies. But, because of the long-term popularity of the film, the merchandising hit the shelves at the right time.
“Because it stuck around for so long, it actually meant that you could actually get the merchandising to consumers while the movie was still in the theaters, which was huge, and it had not been done before,” says Taylor. “There was an incredible repeat-ability to it and there was a cult.”
That cult of fans bought action figures from Kenner, iron-on t-shirts from Factors Inc. and event jewelry in the shape of X-wing fighters from the Weingeroff jewelry firm. Further, they began to recreate the world of Star Wars on their own, making their own memorabilia from scratch.
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Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4.05 billion in 2012 and adopted the allegiance to fans in the process.
While Star Wars radically changed how films are merchandised and distributed, and had a landmark impact on movie and TV special effects, there’s no small drawback to the revolution that Star Wars’ mega-success brought to Hollywood.
As Jonathan Last wrote a decade ago in his Weekly Standard review of Edward Jay Epstein’s book Big Picture, Hollywood now functions “as a giant clearinghouse for intellectual property,” as a successful movie franchise translates into not just toys, t-shirts and fast-food branded with movie logos, but soundtracks, books, DVDs, spin-off TV series, etc.
Which is why, as James McCormick wrote in his 2006 review of Big Picture, Hollywood films essentially now come in two flavors only: the Disney / Marvel / Lucasfilm / Pixar / James Bond / Star Trek-type franchise designed for endless merchandising, and art-house flicks. In the Bush era, these latter films included anti-War on Terror stinkers such as Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted. Today, the theme du jour seems to be revisionist history in the form of the pro-Weather Underground The Company You Keep, the pro-Dan Rather “Truth,” and the pro-Communist Trumbo. These much more economically budgeted films are guaranteed to lose money at the box office, but make pro-Obama studio executives and lefty celebrities with pull (note how many of the above bombs star Robert Redford) feel good about themselves:
The movies made for kids and adolescents are, by design, denatured and created in the form of over-simplified hero tales. And the “art house” loss-leaders created to placate Hollywood’s egomaniacs are about individuals casting off the cultural, moral, and sexual constraints of their societies to find personal liberation (sound familiar?). Since the merchandising blockbusters must satisfy the international market, the “hero tales” transmit little more about American culture than US teens are good with guns. And the “art-house” films are mostly about outdoing the rest of the world in the denigration of Anglosphere domestic culture and sanctifying appropriate victims.
Despite the awful memories of the Star Wars prequels, I’m sure I’ll go see Episode Seven. And I would love to come out of the theater with that same fist-pumping energy that the original Star Wars delivered and/or the feeling of awe from that haunting last scene in the Empire Strikes Back.
But I’d like to think George Lucas himself is savoring the irony that his modestly-budgeted pro-Vietcong 1977 movie helped to make him a billionaire. If only its success had inspired him to make better movies in the process.