As you may have heard, there is a new Star Wars movie coming out in a little under a week. And, no less important, the merchandise is on the shelves. Lucas was already a reasonably well-known and respected young director after the movie American Graffiti came out in In return, he only wanted two things: the rights to any future Star Wars sequels and the rights to all Star Wars merchandising. The studio loved this deal. First, because they were pretty sure Star Wars was going to fail at the box office, giving Lucas the rights to sequels that would never exist. As for the merchandising rights, 20 th Century Fox had been recently burned by a failed attempt to merchandise their Dr. Doolittle movie, and had thus distanced themselves from that world.