How Star Wars Changed Cinema… and Music

Much has been made of how the Mandalorian and Grogu is the first Star Wars movie to hit the big screen in seven years, but there has been a surprising lack of fanfare around it. After all, in the years since the Rise of Skywalker was released to muted reactions way back in 2019, we’ve had multiple Star Wars series to keep fans more than sated. It presumably doesn’t help, of course, that it’s easy to write off the Mandalorian and Grogu as just a longer episode of the Mandalorian - though hopefully it will be more than that. 

With this much Star Wars “content” out there that a new film in the franchise is being met with a general shrug, it becomes easy to forget just how big a deal the original Star Wars was back in 1977.

Back to the ‘70s

The 1970s were, to put it mildly, a bit of a banner decade for cinema, and most especially American cinema. It was the decade that gave us the Godfather, Apocalypse Now, Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, the Exorcist, Rocky, Jaws, Alien, Chinatown, the Life of Brian, a Clockwork Orange, and more classics than you can throw a projector at. At the heart of this explosion of quality films were a group of fresh young filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and a certain visionary named George Lucas. 

While most of these brilliant new talents were greatly influenced by the disillusionment of the decade to make dark, often misanthropic films. Steven Spielberg was one of the few to resist this trend and so, ultimately, was George Lucas. 

Turning Dreams into Reality.      

By the time Lucas got round to making Star Wars, he had enjoyed some major success with the coming of age drama American Graffiti after a decided lack of success with his first film, the technically brilliant but emotionally inert THX 1138. American Graffiti, however, proved to be a much harder sell than his next film: a galaxy spanning space opera, whose plot outline, was seen as being either too ambitious or too silly by Hollywood suits at the time. 

Multiple rewrites later (George always liked writing the least in the filmmaking process), Lucas managed to secure an unofficial greenlight to go ahead and start making his folly, but he would not get much funding to go with it and would only secure a contract after sinking millions of his own dollars into an infamously arduous shoot.  

Right until it was released, Star Wars enjoyed very little support from the studio and even theatres seemed reluctant as it opened on only 35 screens across the United States. 

And then everything exploded.

The Biggest Movie Ever 

Straight off the bat, on its opening weekend, Star Wars proved to be the biggest hit Hollywood had ever seen. People would buy tickets to see it and would go right back in after seeing it. Those few screens obviously sold out completely and cinemas around the country would fight to open the film in as many of their screens as possible. By the end of just its initial run, it would make what is the equivalent of 1.7 billion dollars in today’s money and would win seven of the ten Oscars it was nominated for. 

But its initial popularity was to prove to be only the tip of the iceberg. It would launch a franchise that was to be an absolute cash cow for Lucas (who managed to hold onto an overwhelming portion of its rights) and that he would sell for 4 billion dollars to Disney in 2012. 

Changing the Face of Cinema Forever

More than just a sensation in its own right, Star Wars quickly changed the way movies are made, how they’re marketed, and how they’re distributed forever. Jaws is known as the first modern blockbuster, but Lucas took what his buddy, Steven Spielberg, had laid down and turned the summer movie into the north star around which Hollywood would revolve for ever more. 

His need for groundbreaking visual and sound effects led to the creation of industry leaders like Skywalker Sound, THX Sound and, most significantly, Industrial Light and Magic. 

And then there was, to quote Yogurt from Spaceballs, the moichandising. Star Wars proved that beyond just the film itself billions could be made from merchandising tie-ins, as Star Wars toys, books, costumes, action figures, clothing, video games and comics proved to be just as wildly popular as the films itself. This also, of course, made Hollywood suits far more careful about selling off merchandising rights to their filmmakers. 

And then there was the music.

Spin It On 

A huge part of the success of Star Wars, as Lucas readily admits, is John Williams’ unforgettable score. It made the film what it was and what Williams came up with exceeded every expectation that Lucas had for the soundtrack. Williams was already an established composer and he had just come off making the shark come alive in Jaws, but Star Wars is the score that is still probably most associated with him, and his work changed the sale of movie soundtracks forever.

In another gross miscalculation by 20th Century Fox, who were convinced that no kid in the age of disco and punk would want to buy a double LP of instrumental music, Williams' soundtrack became the biggest selling soundtrack album of all time - and a favourite turntable test record for audiophiles to this day, as the experts Vinyl Pickup can attest - and would make film scores an incredibly lucrative market for record companies. 

But then, even now, with its countless spin offs, sequels, prequels, merchandising tie-ins and a fanbase that can get a bit… overly passionate, there’s still something magical about the original film all these years later.