Star Wars: A Box Office History Lesson
August 13, 2008 11:08
With the animated film "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" opening this week and with "The Dark Knight" steamrolling its way up the charts, a history of lesson may be in order. While "Star Wars" earned the second-highest box office gross in movie history, the film's success came from a remarkably humble beginning.
What's taken for granted today is that opening day a movie plays on thousands of theaters at once. "The Dark Knight," for example, opened this summer on more than 4,000 screens in the U.S. Meanwhile, "Star Wars" opened to a grand total of 32 screens - no, that's not a misprint - and 20th Century Fox was lucky to get them (Lucas was still cutting the film and adding special effects shots right up until the film's release).
In today's Hollywood, with crowded summer movie schedules and big budget marketing efforts, a movie's performance is based primarily on its opening weekend. If a film has a strong opening, it will likely be a hit. But if a movie under-performs in its first few days, then it will probably be a disappointment. Gone are the days when movies would stay in theaters for several months and pick up steam through word of mouth.
For "Star Wars," the first days were actually the hardest. Any fan familiar with the film's history knows the hard battle George Lucas fought to get the world made. Every great movie has a history of struggle before it reaches the big screen, and "Star Wars" had an especially difficult road to the theaters. Lucas couldn't explain the vision in his head, it made no sense on paper, and hardly anyone knew what they had until they actually saw the finished product.
In the spring on 1977, "Star Wars" opened on less than 40 screens across the U.S. - but the phenomenon quickly grew as word spread about the film.
George Lucas recalled the struggle in the book Blockbuster. "It took me two years to get that thing off the ground," Lucas said, "and the only reason it got off the ground was that [former Fox president] Alan Ladd Jr. liked American Graffiti and said, 'I don't understand this movie, I don't get it at all, but I think you're a talented guy and I want you to make this movie.'"
As Ladd explained in Blockbuster, Star Wars got into the theaters because of a now illegal practice called "block booking," which involved studios essentially holding a big movie hostage in exchange for theaters agreeing to play one of the studio's smaller films. Fox told theater owners if they wanted "The Other Side of Midnight," a potboiler based on the Sidney Sheldon bestseller, they had to show this little movie "Star Wars" too. "Most people only booked Star Wars because they had to," Ladd said. "We didn't give them a choice. As illegal as it was, that's the way the distribution game was played." (for more on how "Star Wars" made it to the big screen, check out the Tom's Games feature story "The Secrets of Star Wars")
On the web site In70mm.com, writer Michael Coate did an excellent job tracking the release pattern of "Star Wars" and how quickly it grew. Star Wars was released on May 25, Memorial Day, now a sacred date for blockbuster releases but in those days the deadliest day of the year to release a film. By the week of June 3 it was added to two more theaters, three more the next week, then it made the big jump to just over 100 screens by June 17.
In a previous interview with Tom's Games, Ladd explained the initial reaction audiences had to the few dozen screenings "Star Wars" enjoyed in that spring of 1977. "I realized Star Wars was a hit opening night on a Wednesday," said Ladd. "We broke all the house records of the theaters we opened up in. George was still working on the movie, he was still in the cutting room, when I called him and told him he broke all those records. He was just finishing up the movie, we sent wet prints to the theaters. George's reaction was kind of pessimistic, like, 'Maybe this is just the opening. Science fiction opens well, it has legs for a while, then it crashes.' It never crashed."
Star Wars was in over 500 theaters by July 8, and by August 5 it was playing on over a thousand screens. As Coate reports, the opening of Star Wars was low "even by 1977 standards." Consider a handful of films that were expected to be big hits that summer: "The Deep" opened at 800 theaters, "Exorcist II: The Heretic" had more than 700, and "Smokey and the Bandit" had over 300.
"A big, major release in the mid '70's was 800 prints," said former Fox executive Gareth Wigan in a previous interview with Tom's Games. "Star Wars opened on 40 screens because nobody else wanted to book it. Once there was a gigantic demand for "Star Wars," there was also a huge demand for having it in Dolby sound. Of the 40 prints it opened with, only three were Dolby. The story at the time was that the Dolby switchboard burnt out on the Monday after Star Wars opened because so many people were calling and asking, 'How quickly can you put Dolby into my theater?'"
"Star Wars" was in release for 67 weeks. It was finally pulled from release in September of 1978, except for one theater that was still playing it in Portland, Ore. The Astor Plaza in New York played the movie for 61 weeks where it grossed close to $4 million in that theater alone. The movie was re-released (in its original edit) in 1979, 1981 and 1982 because of popular demand.
Charles Lippincott, the publicist for "Star Wars" at Fox, told writer Ted Edwards of The Unofficial Star Wars Compendium that the film was released at the right time to make box office history, despite the challenges to get the film into theaters. "If the film was redone today, on the basis of the way movies are released with a couple of thousand prints, it probably would have been unsuccessful," Lippincott said. "Theaters didn't want the movie. We were lucky to get thirty theaters to open it."
"The Dark Knight" may soon overtake the original "Star Wars," which grossed nearly $461 million in the U.S. Of course, that number isn't adjusted for inflation. According to Boxofficemojo.com, "Star Wars" earned $1.2 billion domestically and is second only to "Gone with the Wind" in box office gross for the U.S.
"Star Wars: The Clone Wars" will surely open with more screens and considerably more fanfare than "Episode IV: A New Hope" enjoyed more than 30 years ago. But any film released today, even one with the Star Wars name attached to it, will have a nearly impossible task to duplicate the staying power and word-of-mouth phenomenon exhibited by the original "Star Wars."
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