Lucas is the creator, thus he has the intellectual rights. Fox is the distributor so they get a small piece of the pie... besides, they lost most of the rights in '77 already when Lucas negotiated that a lot of the rights, benefits, ... remained to him. Fox agreed because sci-fi wasn't in demand much at the time and they simply didn't believe in the movie. Lucas could make star wars because of the success of american graffiti.
__________________ Kyuzo: Don't you see? A real sword will kill you. Mr. Earl Brooks: If I were here to kill you, you would already be dead. Mercedes: My mother told me to be wary of Fauns. Mr. Le Chiffre: No, I believe in a reasonable rate of return. James Bond: Now the whole world will know you died while you were scratching my balls!
Registered: Jun 2006
Location: The United American Empire
He actually gets 109% of Star Wars profit if you include the under the table sales he heads regarding the deactivated weapons he uses to be reactivated and re-integrated into the Black Market.
Registered: Jun 2006
Location: The United American Empire
Hehe. A lot of the weapons (blasters) in Star Wars are either the same or are replicas of actual firearms of different areas. They are usually modified or deactivated to not be used as an actual firearm unless it needs to fire blanks or something for the movie.
Lucas only got the films made because he agreed, at the time, to take a very small % of the profits from the film but negotiated it so that he would take almost all the revenue from sales of merchandise which, at the time, was usually very little (most films made tiny amounts on merchandise)...Lucas then set about selling huge amounts of merchandise and made a fecking killing in the process
not sure about how the deal stands from dvd sales now though but i would guess that 20th century fox still gets the biggest share of the pie from the movies but not the merchandising
Registered: Jun 2006
Location: The United American Empire
Lucas is an independent filmmaker, so I assume he puts a lot of his own money into his projects and pockets a large margin to use for himself and the upcoming Sequel Trilogy.
seems we're both sort of right...Lucas financed the 2 sequels on his own and got the biggest share of the pie from those...but not a new hope...which fox owns the rights to
yeah there's alot of good stuff in the articles section about how the story developed in Lucas' mind and how it changed between 1973 and 1976 and the way he approached both the OT and the PT stories
makes a damn good read for those who are interested
that page details the book (which used to be a free e-book which is no doubt still available online somewhere) and it mentions the sequel trilogy in appendix D
the book comes out later this year if you're that interested
Registered: Jun 2006
Location: The United American Empire
Very cool. I didn't know it was going to get published.
"Appendix D: The Legend of the Sequel Trilogy -- traces how the concept of sequels to Star Wars were formed and what happened to the infamous third trilogy that followed the original three films"
Oct 12th, 2008 05:24 PM
