8 Ways Star Wars Ruined Cinema

3. Ballooning Budgets

The way we financially measure movies is a little tricky. The industry has been around so long and inflation has been so constant that it's very skewed to modern releases; the highest grossing movies in terms of base dollars and the highest grossing when adjusted for inflation have very little overlap. Star Wars' original gross wouldn't have seen it puncture the Top 5 at the 2014 box office, but when adjusted for inflation it's the third most successful film ever made (behind Gone With The Wind and Avatar). The same, however, can't be said of budgets. Even when taking account of inflation, the list of most expensive movies is dominated by films made in the 21st Century, with notorious overspend Cleopatra coming in at a relatively restrained seventeenth place. Clearly the amount studios spend now is lightyears more than they did decades hence. All this traces back to what Star Wars kicked off. It twisted notion of visual spectacle from being something artistically grand to something big, bold and immediate and that requires a lot more money than hiring a good cinematographer. As special effects (first practical, then CGI) became an ever more important part of the filmmaking process, and the ceiling for what a film could conceivably earn back was removed (Star Wars made double Jaws, the previous highest grossing film ever), the amount movies cost steadily increased. So what if you dropped the GDP of a small country making a film about a killer robot from the future, if it made quintuple that, who cared? The real kicker in all this is that Star Wars itself wasn't a grossly expensive movie, even when compared to other effects extravaganzas of the time (Superman cost five times more). It was economical with what it had, but when that paid massive dividends, being so frugal was less of an issue.