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Why Did George Lucas Take a Pay Cut of $500,000 While Filming Star Wars in 1977?

Star Wars is a George Lucas-created American epic space-opera multimedia franchise that began with the eponymous 1977 film and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. Did you know that George Lucas took a huge payroll while filming Starwars? 

During the production of Star Wars in 1977, George Lucas decided to take a $500,000 pay cut as director in exchange for full ownership of the franchise’s merchandising rights. By 2012, the first six films had generated nearly $20 billion in merchandising revenue.

Did George Lucas Outline All Nine of Starwars Movie? 

Lucas did not outline all nine films; this is a myth. The series was not pre-planned and was created on the fly, explaining why specific details changed and were rearranged. In the prequels, he had a detailed plot and general idea, but things changed all the time during production. He had some story ideas and treatments for the sequels, but it wasn’t some grand 9-film plan that he devised from the start.

Now, an entertainment force even more potent than Lucas will turn what seemed to be a myth into a prophecy.

With the announcement of its $4.05 billion acquisition of Lucasfilm on Tuesday, The Walt Disney Company vowed to make at least three more Star Wars films. The next installment is set to be released in 2015, a decade after Lucas announced that the sixth Star Wars film, Revenge of the Sith, would be his final.

The possibility of at least nine Star Wars films first surfaced in media reports in the late 1970s, but the idea gained traction in a 1983 book called Icons: Intimate Portraits by Denise Worrell. 

According to the book, Lucas intended to create three Star Wars trilogies: one dealing with social and political issues (the set that fans believe covers the films released from 1999 to 2005), another covering personal growth and self-realization (topics covered in the original trio of movies), and the final stanza delving into moral and philosophical issues.

This was never planned as a nine-episode work, The media pounced when I made an offhand comment, ’It might be fun to come back when everyone’s 80 and do another one of these’ But I never had any intention of doing that.

George Lucas

(Source: ScreenRant

Why Did Starwars Start at Episode Four? 

Lucas had written a single epic story encompassing the entire original trilogy, but it was too large to fit into a single film. Instead, he divided his script into three sections. The first act evolved into A New Hope, the second into The Empire Strikes Back, and the third into Return of the Jedi.

Beginning with Episode IV meant immersing audiences in the Star Wars universe with little context. Even the first film alludes to events such as the Clone Wars, which would not be addressed until the prequels were released, so the prequel films became necessary after Star Wars became a worldwide phenomenon. (Source: ScreenRant

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