It blasted through our galaxy for a second time, raking in over $36 million on the first weekend! STAR WARS has now become the first feature film in motion picture history to pull in more than $400 milliom in domestic box-office totals, passing E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump. The story of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, Darth Vader, Obi-Wan Kenobi, C3PO and R2D2 is a timeless tale, or so it seems.
George Lucas, the director, has always wanted to remake several parts of the film. He's been telling people for years, "It didn't turn out very well, it's only about 40 percent of what I want it to be." So, he was delighted when 20th Century Fox studios offered to put up $10 million for the digital touchups. George's digital company, Industrial Light and Magic put in another $5 million or so and, abracadabra, you have a high-powered special edition.
All this is noteworthy because the original budget for STAR WARS was only $10 million. A paltry sum compared to today's big $100 million for movies like Independence Day, but large for 1977. And, out of that $10 million, George only had $2 million for special effects. Only one problem with that­he spent $1 million of that budget on just one shot in the movie (you guess which one) and there was 1000 special effects shots left to do!
Jabba the Hutt, a more populated Mos Eisley spaceport and some other furry creatures had been cut from the original film. Now, through the magic of digital editing techniques, they've been reinserted, giving us over four minutes of new scenes. The painstaking computer composition work creates one seamless scene, time after time, as if it was always there. The Jabba scene took over four months to do. They had to replace the English actor who originally stood in for Jabba with a computer-animated creature who had to slither around like a seal to keep up with the young Harrison Ford…a job ILM technicians said was 'ten times as long as the scenes morphed for Forest Gump and far more complicated.
All this celebration will lead up to the release in 1999 of the first new film in the STAR WARS series. "The next film is about the young Darth Vader…and the young Obi-Wan Kenobi," Lucas reveals. "The first movie will introduce all the characters, the second film focuses on Anakin Skywalker, before he became Vader and joined the Force, and the third film will deal with his fall.
Plans are to start shooting in England this October. The only details we can reveal now is that the characters will be real people, not digitized versions of actors like Alec Guinness who played Obi-Wan. As Rick McCallum, the producer, says, "We're not interested in creating synthetic actors." No, they're just aiming to create great, lasting, blockbuster movies!
What do you think? Send your reactions on the new STAR WARS to Sweet! Digizine, at 148 S. Victory Blvd., Burbank, CA 91502.
