Star Wars

The first Star Wars movie was released in 1977. The studio was unhappy with Star Wars as a title after negative market testing. A competition was held during shooting for cast and crew to come up with a better one, but nothing stuck. The film was initially budgeted at $8 million but production problems forced the studio to contribute an additional $3 million. Within three weeks of the film's release, 20th Century Fox's stock price doubled to a record high. Its success spawned a host of other science fiction films using the same newly developed computer-based special-effects technologies that Star Wars had used so effectively. The famous opening title sequence of the Star Wars series was first used in a series called Phantom Creeps (1939). George Lucas is said to have based the character of Hans Solo (Harrison Ford) on his friend, director Francis Ford Coppola.