10 Mega-Successful Blockbusters Everyone Expected To Fail

7. Star Wars

In a unique turn in this list, not even the filmmakers thought this would end well. Before embarking on his revolutionary space fantasy George Lucas had been carving out a respectable career as a key member of new Hollywood. A close friend of Francis Ford Coppola and the rest of New Hollywood, he'd found major success with American Graffiti; his throwback to 1950s Americana had garnered him his first Oscar nomination. Now he was putting a lot of his own money into a sprawling passion project that required costly, untested special effects Given this was decades before the popularisation of the Internet and that much of the invested money had been the director's, the public and distributor 20th Century Fox weren't too bothered if it did bomb; there wasn't much at stake for them. For Lucas it would prove to be career defining. Legend has it that he and Spielberg even had a bet on whose 1977 sci-fi, Star Wars or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind respectively, would be the bigger flop (both he and Steven thought their own film had little merit). From his standpoint, Lucas' apprehension makes a lot of sense. Sci-fi wasn't a dominant force in cash-raking cinema and the production had been dogged with issues, ranging from your usual delays to sandstorms on set, all the time pushing the budget up. Of course, to everyone's surprise it not only grabbed audience's attention, leading to images of queues literally snaking around the block, but completely revolutionised the way movies were made. Not bad for an expected flop.