(Credits: Far Out / Joey Gannon)
Fri 20 March 2026 3:30, UK
Few people have had as much of an impact on cinema as George Lucas, both in a positive and a negative way.
On the plus side, his films and ideas have made billions of dollars and have entertained generations of fans. Alternatively, there is nobody who has worked so hard to disassemble their own legacy, through their own actions and the actions that have been carried out in their name.
He set the template for one of the most divisive topics in cinematic history, the franchise, and once the first Star Wars film hit the big screen and became a cultural sensation, it was only a matter of time before more followed.
There had been sequels before, but not like this, and Star Wars became a multimedia juggernaut that made more money than anybody could have ever predicted. This was great from a business perspective, but this impact has cast a long shadow on today’s profit-driven Hollywood model.
The argument persists to this day over whether Lucas invented the modern ‘blockbuster’; it’s between him and his good friend Steven Spielberg, but it took the latter much longer to fully implement a successful series in the way the former had done in the late 1970s. Lucas has a very different view, however, as outlined in Robert J Emery’s book The Directors: Take Four, where he thinks that plenty of other people beat him to the punch.
“Closer to when I was making my films, there were the James Bond films, which were big blockbusters,” he recalled, “There were Irwin Allen’s disaster films like The Towering Inferno and [The] Poseidon Adventure. Those films were big blockbusters. And then Francis [Ford Coppola]’s The Godfather and Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws, which were both big blockbusters. I came along after that group.”
According to Lucas, though, there’s one film that defines the term better than any other, claiming, “Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster in every sense of the word. Even bigger than anything I have ever done, and it’s still number one”.
If you take the word ‘blockbuster’ literally, which is a film that has people queue for blocks and blocks at a time to buy tickets, then Gone with the Wind is the greatest. The 1939 Civil War classic allegedly sold over 200million tickets in North America, more than any other movie in history, such that if you adjust for inflation, it is the highest-grossing movie of all time, a record that may never be broken. It captured the imaginations of millions of people at the time and helped to establish the cinema as a place of escapism and idealism, and it remains a must-watch for all cinephiles to this day.
Star Wars is undoubtedly one of the most important movies ever when it comes to establishing patterns in Hollywood; however, it is important to acknowledge the contributions of those films that came before it, and even George Lucas, a man who has made a career out of having no self-awareness, knows this to be true.
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