‘Star Wars’ Appeal Is a Surprise Even to Creator Lucas

While his 20-year-old movie was drawing record-breaking crowds this weekend, it was business as usual for “Star Wars” creator George Lucas, who was holed up at his Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. The filmmaker was spending time with his children and working on his next film trilogy--the “Star Wars” “prequel”--and intentionally avoiding reports of how the movie was faring at the box office.

“I didn’t want to be bothered with all that craziness that goes on on opening weekend,” said Lucas in a phone interview Monday from his Northern California offices. “I usually go to Hawaii when my movies open, but I just took off and spent the weekend with my kids.”

He finally heard the ground-breaking figures Monday morning. “Star Wars” had earned $35.9 million since opening Friday, the highest ever for a film reissue and the eighth-highest opening weekend of all time.

By contrast, in an era when films did not have such widespread releases, “Star Wars” opened in 1977 on 43 screens and made $1.6 million in its opening weekend.

In an office pool, Lucas had bet that the re-release would open with a modest $10 million, but he quietly thought the box-office tally might inch up closer to $18 million to $20 million.

“That’s about as far as I was speculating,” he said. “Fortunately, I’m not in a position where my career or my company rises and falls on what the opening weekend is.”

Lucas said his impetus for reissuing the movie, to coincide with its 20th anniversary, was threefold: to make the improvements that had been nagging at him since the film was first made on a slim $10-million budget, to give something back to the legions of die-hard “Star Wars” fans and to provide a large-screen venue for his 4-year-old son to see the movie as it was intended. (Though his two older children had seen it several times, the 4-year-old, his youngest, had never seen it, in any form.)

When he announced the film’s re-release last year, Lucas thought the film might play in selected theaters across the country, never envisioning that it would show on 2,100 screens and sell out at most showings its first weekend out.

“We were hoping we could get 200 theaters, maybe 400,” Lucas said. “We had no idea. But then theater owners began to get really excited during the summer after we ran some trailers and it started getting standing ovations. We began to say, ‘This is going to be more than just a limited event for fans. This is going to be a big thing for everybody.’ I realized that maybe there were more people like me that wanted to see it with their kids on the big screen.”

*

Lucas regards the success of the re-release as a ringing endorsement of film-going and an affirmation that even with video, cable and other entertainment venues, people still flock to movie theaters.

“The best part of this is it has become a celebration of the theatrical experience,” Lucas said.

Now he is looking forward both to the re-release of the next two installments of the trilogy--”The Empires Strikes Back” (1980) and “The Return of the Jedi” (1983)--and to making another trilogy, the first three chapters in the ambitious saga.

Lucas pointed out that “Star Wars” is different from the current generation of effects-laden blockbusters--which his films helped spawn--in that it is more character-driven and slower paced than many of the current crop of “thrill ride” style films.

The next trilogy, the first installment of which will be released in 1999, will be similar to the first in its pacing and structure.

“I’m not going to become what the media sort of decided I was: a fast-paced, roller-coaster, no-story, no-character filmmaker. My stories may not be as complex as some people would like, but they still have a plot. All the ‘Star Wars’ films are pretty much the same. They have a particular style where the pacing is integral to the storytelling. The new ones will be pretty much like the old ones. They will have amazing action sequences, but effects are only there to tell a story.”

Lucas and 20th Century Fox, which distributed the movie and owns the rights to “Star Wars” but not the rest of the series, carefully chose this weekend to bring the science-fiction classic back to theaters because of the lack of blockbuster-style movies competing for audience share this time of year.

Does he expect “Empire,” which will be released Feb. 21, and “Jedi,” due out on March 7, to attract the same huge crowds?

“Obviously there will be a lot more competition coming out in the marketplace as the other movies come out,” Lucas said. “I don’t expect them to do as well as this. I didn’t expect this to do as well. But I do expect them to do well. I would expect them to make at least $10 million. Anything above that would be a pleasant surprise.”