Star Wars has taken in roughly $10.7 billion at the worldwide box office across its theatrical releases, including this year’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, according to figures compiled by The Numbers. Merchandise tied to the franchise has been generating money every year since 1977, and by License Global’s December 2023 estimate, cumulative Star Wars merchandise sales sit around $29 billion, with other trade estimates running higher still. Either number clears the films’ box office total several times over. The story people tell about how George Lucas ended up owning that revenue stream, though, isn’t the one his own lawyer tells.
What actually happened in the 1977 negotiation
The popular version holds that a shortsighted 20th Century Fox let Lucas keep the merchandising rights to Star Wars as a throwaway concession, on the theory that nobody in 1977 believed toys based on a movie could make real money. Tom Pollock, who was Lucas’s entertainment attorney at the time and negotiated the actual contract, told Deadline in 2015 that this isn’t what happened. In the original deal, Lucas took a reduced fee, $50,000 each to write, produce, and direct, and kept the sequel rights in exchange. Merchandising wasn’t part of that trade. Fox held the merchandising rights to the first film and, in Pollock’s words, “did very well” with them in the year or two after release.
What actually changed by the time of the second film
Lucas won the merchandising rights back separately, during negotiations for The Empire Strikes Back, and only because he had leverage he hadn’t had the first time: Star Wars had become the highest-grossing film ever made, and Lucas proposed to self-finance the sequel entirely through Lucasfilm rather than take Fox’s money. The deal he and Pollock offered Fox traded seven years of theatrical and video distribution rights for everything else, merchandising, soundtrack albums, music publishing, and television rights included. Fox agreed, according to Pollock, because “they wanted the sequel,” and Lucas was under no obligation to bring it to them at all. Merchandising wasn’t handed over as a hedge against a movie nobody believed in; it was taken back deliberately, once the first film had already proven itself and Fox had more to lose by refusing than Lucas did.
Why the revenue figure is harder to pin down than the deal itself
The dollar amounts attached to “Star Wars merchandising” vary enormously depending on the source, and that variance says something on its own. A widely repeated projection that Star Wars merchandise would generate $5 billion in a single year traces back to one 2015 estimate from Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne, a figure Entertainment Strategy Guy later documented being repeated across outlets for years with no new data behind it, even as Hasbro’s “partner brands” segment, which bundles Star Wars together with Frozen and Marvel, reported a 21 percent sales decline in its fourth-quarter 2017 results — a drop the company itself attributed primarily to Star Wars. Separately, a frequently cited $56.6 billion figure is often misattributed to Star Wars merchandise specifically, when it’s actually License Global’s tally of the Walt Disney Company’s total licensed-merchandise revenue across every Disney-owned property in 2016, Marvel, Pixar, and Disney princesses included, not Star Wars alone. Disney doesn’t break out Star Wars-specific merchandise revenue in its public financial filings, which means every circulating total, including the $29 billion License Global estimate, is a trade-industry approximation rather than an audited figure.
What holds up even with that uncertainty
That uncertainty doesn’t change the basic order of magnitude. Even License Global’s more conservative $29 billion estimate is close to three times the franchise’s $10.7 billion box office total, and the box office number is unusually solid by comparison, since ticket sales are tracked and reported film by film. The interesting finding isn’t that merchandising outearned the movies. Almost everyone already assumes that. It’s that the specific number people cite for how much, and the specific story people tell about how Lucas got the rights to it, have both calcified into repeated fact through sheer repetition rather than anyone checking the original sourcing.
The distinction Pollock describes, between a right handed over as an afterthought and a right taken back once leverage exists, maps onto a decision independent writers and creators eventually face: whether to keep publishing entirely on someone else’s platform under someone else’s terms, or to hold onto the parts of the business, an email list, a paid subscription base, a direct relationship with readers, that don’t depend on a platform’s continued goodwill. Lucas didn’t get Star Wars’ most valuable long-term asset as a consolation prize. He got it by building independent leverage, one successful, self-financed film, until the platform needed him more than he needed the platform, and negotiating from there.
The number that was actually decided decades ago
Whichever total figure eventually gets properly audited, if one ever does, the box office comparison was settled a long time ago: merchandising overtook ticket sales for this franchise well before Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, let alone before the sequel trilogy arrived.
What took much longer to sort out publicly is the far less repeated fact that Lucas earned that revenue stream by negotiating twice, not by getting lucky once.
