NEW YORK, May 4, 2015: For many science fiction fans, May 4th marks Star Wars Day – an event that sees aficionados of the hugely successful movie series celebrate Star Wars culture.
This year’s festivities come hot on the heels of last month’s Star Wars Celebration, a fan event which saw the premiere of the second Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, the next installment of the saga, which will see Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill reprise their roles as Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker from the original trilogy.
In celebration of the occasion, Guinness World Records, the global authority on record-breaking achievements, delved deep into the depths of the Guinness World Records archive to bring you our pick of Star Wars titles.
Largest fortune made from a film franchise
Rather than taking a director’s fee for Star Wars (USA, 1977), George Lucas (USA) acquire d the rights to all sequels and future merchandise. In 2011, Forbes assigned him a net worth of $3.2 billion (£2 billion).
Highest-grossing space-opera movie
Star Wars Episode I – The Phantom Menace (USA, 1999) had grossed $924 million (£577 million) worldwide by 3 February 2000.
Largest collection of Star Wars memorabilia
Steve Sansweet (USA) has amassed an estimated 300,000 unique items at Rancho Obi-Wan in northern California, USA. As of 15 May 2013, only 90,546 items have been accurately audited and catalogued – a number sufficient enough, however, to beat the previous Guinness World Records figure by a factor of four. Sansweet estimates that the cataloguing process will take years to complete, as his collection continues to grow.
Largest simultaneous premiere – territories
Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (USA, 2005) was released simultaneously in 115 territories by 20th Century Fox on 19 May 2005. It went on to secure an international gross of $303 million (£165.9 million).
Biggest opening weekend ever for a re-released film
Shown in cinemas in 1997 as the first of Lucasfilm’s 20th anniversary Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy, Episode IV: A New Hope (USA) grossed $35,906,661 (£21,903,063) in US cinemas on the weekend of 31 January-2 February 1997. A New Hope took $579,646,015 (£353,584,069) worldwide to June 1997 – the highest theatrical gross for a film re-release.
Most Oscars won for visual effects
Dennis Muren (USA) won the Academy Award for Visual Effects a total of six times between 1983 and 1994. He has also received two Special Achievement Awards, in 1981 for Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (USA, 1980) and in 1984 for Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (USA, 1983).
He also received the Technical Achievement Award in 1982 “For the development of a Motion Picture Figure Mover for animation photography”. In addition, Muren holds the record for the most Oscar nominations for visual effects. He has been nominated on 13 occasions, the first being in 1982 for Dragonslayer (USA, 1981) and the most recent being in 2006 for War of the Worlds (USA, 2005).
Best-selling single of instrumental music
A 1977 disco arrangement of John Williams’s (USA) music to Star Wars – entitled “Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band” – by record producer Meco, aka Domenico Monardo (USA), remains the only instrumental single to have reached platinum status, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), having sold more than 2 million units. The track featured on the album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk (1977), which outsold the original movie soundtrack and was also certified platinum.
Largest entertainment voice-over project
More than 200,000 lines of dialogue were recorded by several hundred voice actors for the LucasArts videogame Star Wars: The Old Republic (Electronic Arts, BioWare and LucasArts, 2011). The MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) was first released on 20 December 2011.
First Star Wars videogame
The inaugural Star Wars videogame, The Empire Strikes Back (Parker Brothers, 1982) was based on the second film in the series and made for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision.
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