Star Wars: 10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Jabba The Hutt
8. He Cost Half A Million Bucks
As befits one whose tastes ran to the luxurious, Jabba the Hutt was very, very expensive. The puppet's enormous size and plethora of moving parts cost upwards of half a million dollars, and that was back in 1983 when half a mil was a lot of money. That price included state of the art animatronics for the eyes and the essential ability to smoke his hookah on-camera.
For comparison, the entire budget of A New Hope in 1977 was $4 million.
The puppet took three solid months to build and weighed 200lbs. Even at such huge expense it was delicate and the puppeteers had to be careful not to mangle Jabba's supple alien flesh as they gesticulated.
The model-making was helmed by Stuart Freeborn, whose team had also built the Yoda puppet for The Empire Strikes Back. Jabba, though, was on a different level entirely, and is still probably the most expensive movie puppet ever created.