It’s the 40th Anniversary of Star Wars. Exactly 40 years ago as you read this, people were queuing around Grauman’s Chinese Theater and the other cinemas that Fox had been able to push the weird throwback space fantasy from that American Grafitti guy into, desperate to get a glimpse of Luke Skywalker’s hero’s journey. To put this in context, that’s the same period of time Anakin Skywalker went from plucky slave racer to galactic dictator before being redeemed out of love from his son.

That’s no doubt a crazy thought for those who worked on the film, from director George Lucas down to the Elstree set hands, and frankly unfathomable to those who’ve grown up with the Force as permanent a fixture as the film medium itself. After all, those queues weren't a fleeting fancy; in the months that followed the landmark release, George Lucas’ B-movie would become the biggest film ever made, over the years evolving into the biggest entertainment franchise in the western world, “ending” two times already and yet coming back even bigger to enthral a new generation.

Most people reading this won’t remember what it was like at the start. In fact, the majority won’t have even been alive when that happened. Many won’t have even seen the film we’re talking about – for the twentieth anniversary, George Lucas redid the trilogy with added scenes and the most economical CGI 1997 had to offer and began to suppress the previous versions. That’s right, we’ve now had the rightly reviled Special Editions longer than the untampered versions.

Jabba and Han in Star Wars Special Edition

Of course, you don’t have to have been there at the start to appreciate Star Wars. That’s why it endures. Millennials grew up with the prequels, yet many were truly welcomed into that galaxy far, far away through the original adventures, and an entire subculture of YouTube wouldn’t exist if the next generation weren’t shocked by the “I am your father” reveal as toddlers; viewed in original 35mm, on VHS taped off the TV or a spanking new Blu-Ray, the original film is still powerful (and no version of CGI Jabba will change that). But Star Wars is more than the movies and the ephemera. It was a game-changing phenomenon, something that those not there in 1977 will never experience anything like. There will never be another Star Wars.

Of course, The Last Jedi will be a bona fide event and other movies can and will reach similar financial heights, but Star Wars really is “Year Zero”. As a culture we love to mark out dates as “The Beginning”; our entire date system is built around the start of a new religion, while modern western society is defined either from the end of World War II in 1945 or of the Cold War in 1990. In cinema, there’s a litany of turning points; the advent of sound, the introduction of color, the rise of computer-generated effects and animation. But if you want to cite a Year Zero for cinema, a moment where everything before becomes ancient history and everything following is contemporary, you can’t get much better than 25th May 1977.

That’s not intending to downplay every other film before or since and it’s recognized that to single out one movie as “most important” is internet hyperbole personified, but in terms of irreplaceable cultural and societal impact Star Wars is a once-in-a-century event. There’s been imitators, inspirations and massive, industry-altering successes besides, yet none have been as seismic or all-in-one.

The majesty of the original Star Wars (we'll have no A New Hope here) is well-documented - from the wonderful, recognizable characters to symphonic score it rightly deserves to be regarded as of the greatest movies ever made - so we won't spend excessive time on that here. Instead, we want to focus on what releasing such a great movie of such broad appeal meant. There's so much within Star Wars that people love to discuss - how astounding the special effects were, the way it made merchandising essential and how it only got better with the sequel - but any artistic influence on film language is only half the story.

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Luke Leia Han Solo Mark Hamill Carrie Fisher Harrison Ford Star Wars Fan Club

That Star Wars was a box office smash is often taken for granted, so let's have a moment to just appreciate the scale. Yes, $410 million on initial release, upped to $775 million with its numerous re-releases in the decades following is pretty standard base numbers today and if any of the Disney-era films made that much they’d be decried as failures. But that's missing context - it was eviscerating an all-time record set by Jaws a couple of years previously and hitting heights hitherto unthought of. While adjusting gross Titanic and Avatar still technically made more domestically and worldwide respectively, when you take a look at the pure number of tickets sold it’s a different story.

According to BoxOfficeMojo, Star Wars sold approximately 178,119,600 actual tickets domestically, second only to perennially re-released Gone With The Wind – Cameron’s films are much lower, with Avatar selling almost half that number. The closest we’ve come to a film matching this recently was The Force Awakens, which is really just aftershock of what Star Wars initially did; the 1977 film didn't just look good on a balance sheet, it dominated the conversation.

And as it raised the bar, with that came a wider industry shift. Star Wars changed (and, depending on your outlook, ruined) cinema in the 1980s. The past decade had been dominated by New Hollywood, a movement that took the old fashioned, rigid studio system to its knees and seemingly turned the power over to directors; the likes of Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian de Palma and Lucas' closest contemporary Steven Spielberg all made movies of high artistic value that proved to be incredibly profitable (before JawsThe Godfather had the biggest box office gross).

George Lucas was, by all accounts, the snobbiest of these movie brats yet also incredibly nostalgia driven, which led to him making a film inspired by a mixture of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress and cheap Flash Gordon serials. Its subsequent success solidified a new way to make big, big money from films that Jaws had teased a couple of years earlier; massive openings in staggering numbers of cinemas. Before, films would open in New York and LA then roll out slowly to other areas if successful (this may in part be why people view older decades as more consistent – like foreign language films today, the chaff is weeded out before it makes it wide), but quickly it became top-heavy and all about the run-and-gun. This is obviously now the predominant ideology of mainstream moviemaking to the extreme - opening weekends make or break a film - and slowly had an impact on the sort of projects green-lit; studios want movies that open with a splash and thus have a marketable hook, which starts to alter the content.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Kylo Ren TV Spots

This is still the rule today and so while much has happened in cinema since then, from a business sense it’s all in the shadow of Star Wars. Superheroes and shared universes, today’s modern trends, are born of this shift and attempts to evolve it. Even completely separate phenomena, like the rise of slashers in the 1980s, had an impact from Star Wars; Friday the 13th, the financial lead of the pack, was novel for adopting the blockbuster release method for a low-budget film.

The closest we’ve come recently is The Avengers, which made $1.5 billion, led to a spate of films trying to mimic the shared universe model and on a subtly different measure made sprawling franchises (something even Star Wars has now aped) the name of the game. But all that feels like a tier down – that box office is half Star Wars for one, and shared universes are acceleration rather than steering. The previous landmark before that is Avatar, but despite making a more money even accounting for inflation that’s left minimal cultural impact (3D only persists because theaters spent too much on upgrading projectors to let it lie). Indeed, plenty of other movies have made money or had a traceable impact, spawning rivaling franchises. Jurassic Park, Fast and Furious, X-Men and Batman are or were bankable event movies – The Fate of the Furious even made more than The Force Awakens on its opening weekend – but they don’t have that same revolutionary spark. Jurassic World showed there was interest in dinosaurs, nothing more.

The core of it is less a detraction of these movies we get now, rather a simple fact of the world they're in. We can’t have another Star Wars. In an age where films are increasingly accessible, available on any device in basically any format, the tradition of a cinema-going event that spans the zeitgeist just doesn’t exist. Obviously that leads to lower ticket numbers, but neither can our culture unite behind and be so irreversibly altered by a single entertainment piece because of how the entertainment spectrum has fractured. Gaming, television and home video are now powerhouse industries by themselves, while cinema attendance is declining and the types of movies that play shrinking. In this climate, you can create something that develops a fervent fanbase but the dedication is inverse to scale. Just look at how, regardless of how it turns out, Twin Peaks: The Revival will have a fraction of the long-term impact of the original run.

While Star Wars didn't cause home video or the Golden Age of Television, it nevertheless came at a time when the playing field was flatter and a big success could shape everything around it. Today, forty years on, there is a lot of change coming to film in the next decade or so - the increased discussions of Day One VOD, the dominance of Netflix and the threat of the box office imploding all necessitate big shifts - but none of what happens will be at the hands of a single film.

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Even as release windows shrink more and more, there will always be films. Heck, there's going to be many more Star Wars films. But there will never be a film quite like Star Wars again.

 

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