Given the amount of money that Star Wars rakes in in today’s day and age, it might be easy to forget that the film had very humble beginnings. While there was money being thrown around that produced some very expensive films, Star Wars was pretty much a fixer-upper throughout its production, which had George Lucas employing every trick in the book to make his spectacle as budget-friendly as possible.
When it came to the time period when Lucas made Star Wars, and to some extent even today, it is easy to compare the franchise with Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece space opera, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Star Wars creator opened up about what he thought of the comparison and how it might almost always favor Star Wars.
The difference between Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey comes down to how much each film had lying around
George Lucas was very proud of how Star Wars was made. The goals of the two films, the director explained, were different, with Lucas focused on making a spectacle and Kubrick obsessed with perfection. Speaking in an interview (via Original Trilogy), he explained:
Technically, you always compare things against 2001. If you took one of our shots and ran it on the light box and set it next to one of Kubrick’s shots, you would say, ‘Well, his are better.’ But there is no way, given the time and money we’ve had, that Kubrick could do any better. He was striving for perfection and had a shot ratio thirty times what we have.
When you spend that kind of time and money you can get things perfect. We went into this trying to make a cheap, children’s movie for $8 million. We didn’t go in and say that we were going to make the perfect science fiction film, but we are gonna make the most spectacular thing you’ve ever seen!
The entire argument that the director had was that Star Wars put spectacle first, while Kubrick put a lot of effort into making shots perfect, as was the norm for him. While Star Wars was geared toward a younger audience, no such audience was in mind for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which went towards the harder side of the science diction genre.
Star Wars is a franchise that Disney needs to clean up ASAP
While the Disney era of Star Wars has managed to deliver some great moments in the franchise, the general vibe that the House of Mouse has created around the IP has largely alienated the fandom. This has led to a slew of projects that Disney has put out to be viewed with some suspicion by the fans of the franchise.
Now with most of Disney’s Star Wars content in production, and a new trilogy on the way as well, Disney has the opportunity to get its old fans back into Star Wars, by directing its focus on telling stories that resonate with the core themes of the franchise. The House of Mouse must realize that it cannot court a new set of fans who are not interested in the franchise anyway, while also keeping those actually interested in the IP happy as well.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
