Disney’s Star Wars Versus George Lucas’ Trilogy Box Office: Who Really Won the Profit Wars
A decade after George Lucas passed Star Wars to Disney, the saga has swung between runaway hits and divisive misses. We stack up the receipts to see who really ruled the box office—Disney’s modern juggernaut or Lucas’s trilogy.
Disney has had Star Wars for over a decade now, and the results have been a mix of massive wins and head-scratching misses. So let’s take the emotion out of it for a second and look at what really matters to studios: the money. How do Disney’s Star Wars movies stack up next to George Lucas’s runs when you follow the profits?
The Disney era, by the numbers
Per Disney’s own filings tallied by Forbes, the most expensive Star Wars movie to date is also the biggest money-maker of this era. Yes, The Force Awakens cost a fortune, and it paid off.
- The Force Awakens: cost $638.9 million, profit $500.2 million
- Rogue One: cost $327.5 million, profit $258.4 million
- The Last Jedi: cost $414.6 million, profit $324.0 million
- The Rise of Skywalker: cost $593.7 million, profit $48.0 million
- Solo: A Star Wars Story: loss of $103.3 million
The quick read: Disney launched huge and healthy with Force Awakens, Rogue One, and Last Jedi. The trilogy closer barely cleared the bar. Solo flat-out lost money.
How Lucas’s original trilogy measured up
If you want to feel how seismic the first wave was for Fox, look at return multiples. According to Forbes, A New Hope delivered a 45.7x rate of return. The Empire Strikes Back did 12.1x, and Return of the Jedi pulled 11.3x. Those are monster multipliers you just do not see often at that scale.
Prequels vs Disney’s trilogy: who actually made more?
This is where it gets interesting. Forbes’s analysis puts the combined production cost of Disney’s sequel trilogy (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker) at $720 million, versus $345 million for the prequel trilogy (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith).
Box office? Disney’s trilogy hauled in $4.475 billion worldwide. The prequels did $2.437 billion. So Disney’s run grossed more overall.
But because the prequels were made for much less, they came out ahead on profit margin. In plain English: Disney won on raw dollars; the prequels won on percentage. One nuance worth flagging: those trilogy totals are production budgets. The movie-by-movie 'cost' figures above include the full spend beyond production, like marketing and other expenses, which is why the earlier totals look so much higher.
Meanwhile, George Lucas is actually moving on
Thirteen years after selling Star Wars to Disney, Lucas is finally putting some real distance between himself and the galaxy far, far away. He is focused on opening the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, slated for 2026, a nearly billion-dollar passion project.
Out of 33 inaugural galleries, only one will showcase Star Wars vehicle designs. He told IGN he only included that much so people would not walk in asking where the Star Wars was, and he made it very clear where his head is now:
It is one gallery out of 33. And I did it grudgingly. I did not want people to come to the museum and say, 'Where's the Star Wars?'
Disney took it over and they gave it their vision. That is what happens. Of course I have moved past it. I mean, I have got a life. I am building a museum. A museum is harder than making movies.
He has been working on the museum for the last six decades, and after years of starts, stops, and site changes, it is finally almost here.
You can stream the Star Wars films on Disney+. And I am curious: do you think Disney’s films have stacked up well against Lucas’s runs where it counts, or has the newer era left money on the table?