The world's richest filmmaker celebrates his birthday today

George Lucas, whose fortune has been estimated differently in different years, but somewhere around $5 billion, is an example of a classic American "success story" in the spirit of Silicon Valley, when a "nerd" who managed to comprehend the harsh laws of business becomes a multi-billionaire. (Here, however, it should be noted that in his youth, Lucas was a race car driver, so it is not all that simple).

When he began his career in cinema, he spent a whole year and a half painfully writing the script for the first "Star Wars", abandoning the traditional rigid Hollywood form in favor of an ancient myth. Then - he tortured himself in the same way when he, still a novice director, forced himself to yell on the set of these "Star Wars" at famous actors who thought that they were playing in some stupid children's fairy tale.

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His true calling was revealed completely unexpectedly - perhaps unexpectedly for Lucas himself. When he was the first in Hollywood to understand that the main profit could be derived from the sale of accompanying goods for films.

As a result, in the first eight years since the premiere of Star Wars, toys depicting the characters of the film epic were sold for $3.8 billion, and the revenue from their sales exceeded the box office receipts from the films. It is believed that Lucas even extended the screen life of secondary characters if the corresponding toys continued to be in demand. He himself denied this. Well, then everything was quite traditional. Having founded and promoted his own film company Lucasfilm, he sold it to Disney in 2012 for $4.1 billion.

Nevertheless, at first Lucas still returned to arthouse cinema from time to time - for example, in 1985 he produced, together with Coppola, the film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which received an award at the Cannes Film Festival. And in general, Cannes considers him "one of their own" to the point that in 2024 they awarded him the honorary Golden Palm. However, in fairness it should be said that since its debut in 1997, when it was awarded to Ingmar Bergman, this award has greatly devalued.

Photo: Lucas the director in his youth Facebook