A closer look
George Lucas completely outsmarted Fox executives in the nineteen-seventies by accepting a lower salary for directing Star Wars in exchange for keeping the merchandising rights, a move the studio happily agreed to because movie toys were basically worthless at the time and they thought they just scored a massive bargain on a weird space opera; fast forward a few decades, and Lucas became a billionaire largely by selling bits of plastic shaped like droids and asthmatic cyborgs to grown adults, exposing the fact that the studio executives essentially handed away the most lucrative toy empire in human history simply because they lacked the foresight to realize that nerds would eventually want to physically hoard every single background character in the entire galaxy
