CASE STUDY: Star Wars films

Basic info:

Star Wars is an American epic space opera franchise centered on a film series created by George Lucas. The film series has spawned a media franchise outside the film series called the Expanded Universe including books, television series, computer and video games, and comic books. These supplements to the film trilogies have resulted in significant development of the series' fictional universe. (Wikipedia)

There is no denying that the launch of the Star Wars films, which began in 1977, is a cinematic and historic significance that had a huge impact to the change in how films are made and in the way we watch them today. A specific area that contributed to the film industry is in movie marketing, which is primarily merchandising. The success of the film was also evident in other Star Wars-related products such as toys, books, video games, other media and apparel etc, the extensions of Star Wars. This was not new to the contemporary audience of Star Wars upon its first release, as the adults of the 70s grew up with Superman dolls and James Bond toy cars and such, but its significant affect on the masses instigated Hollywood to realize the enormous profit potential with extending a film’s success in other areas of entertainment and media.

In my diagram (above) the central entity is the Star Wars films from which stems various other merchandising outlets. Certainly, the huge success of Star Wars still continue today which further supports that its merchandising success constitutes to its legacy. The creation of the Star Wars films were not solely intended to create profit; although on an executive level involved in producing the film whose primary motivation was to make money, the stem of the merchandises served as subsidiaries to the intents of the creator George Lucas. The films are essentially produced with the sole intent for the personal artistic expression of the creator to front the successes of each Star Wars episodes. They were produced to engage the audience with story telling and to communicate an idea held by the film’s creator.