Star Wars Abundance
For 6.14 hours of earning time, unskilled workers could enjoy the entire nine-episode $1.65 billion Star Wars series at their local theater. Rent from Amazon for less than two hours.
Star Wars Day is May 4th, based on the saying “May the force be with you.” The first Star Wars film was released in 1977—Episode IV of what would become a nine-part saga completed over 42 years. At the time, movie tickets cost an average of $2.23, while unskilled workers earned about $3.15 per hour, indicating a time price of 42.5 minutes. By the time Episode IX debuted in 2019, average ticket prices had risen to $9.16, but unskilled wages had increased to $13.66 per hour, bringing the time price down to 40.2 minutes. While the money price of a Star Wars ticket increased 311 percent over this 42-year period, hourly income increased by 334 percent making the the time price decrease by 5.4 percent.
How much entertainment can you buy with a minute of your time? It’s curious that a movie ticket costs the same whether the film cost $5 million or $250 million to make. While massive budgets don’t guarantee success, they often correlate with higher box-office returns. Audiences have come to expect that big budgets deliver big entertainment value.
The original 1977 Star Wars had a production budget of $11 million—about $46 million when adjusted for inflation to 2019 prices. In contrast, the 2019 installment had a budget of $275 million, making it nearly 6 times more expensive to produce than the 1977 episode. The 1977 film was tremendously successful generating over 70 times its budget in box office gross ticket sales.
Adjusted to 2019 prices, the nine Star Wars episodes cost a total of $1.648 billion to create. Unskilled workers only need to spend 368.6 minutes, or six hours and eight minutes to earn the money to watch the entire series.
Today you can watch all nine episodes by signing up for a one-month subscription to Disney+. A standard plan with ads has a price point of $8.99 per month, while the standard plan without ads is $12.99 per month. This is less than one hour of earning time for an unskilled worker. Disney+ is the home for every Star Wars show, from the popular The Mandalorian to Ahsoka to the new releases like Andor and Tales of the Underworld.
While audiences paid a similar time price for all nine episodes, the ratio of inflation-adjusted movie budget per minute of worker earning time increased 527 percent over this 42-year period from $1.09 million per minute in 1977 to $6.83 million per minute in 2019.
The newest Mission: Impossible movie, The Final Reckoning, had a budget of around $400 million. Why do companies spend so much to create movies today? Because the production cost can be spread across millions of viewers. The more people buying tickets the more affordable a movie becomes. Adam Smith wrote about this in 1776, observing that a larger market provides more opportunities for specialization, innovation, and ultimately, economic growth. This is the paradox and promise of knowledge products like movies: once created, they can be shared infinitely—with everyone, everywhere, all at once. May the force of movie innovation abundance continue to enrich our lives with great stories, breathtaking visual effects, and inspiring creativity.
Tip of the hat: Eric Stats
Learn more about our infinitely bountiful planet at superabundance.com. We explain and give hundreds of examples why more people with freedom means much more resource abundances for everyone in our book, Superabundance, available at Amazon.
Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a board member at Human Progress.