Star Wars is more than a cult. It's the best sci-fi lit made in Hollywood

At what point does a popular film franchise morph into literature, from being a mere bunch of moneyspinning sequels? I use the word literature rather broadly, but the notion does strike you watching The Force Awakens — the fabulous reboot of Star Wars that opened in India this weekend.

Before anything, the sequel is not the greatest sci-fi spectacle ever seen. Despite the monster $766-million global gross (at the time of going to press), the film may or may not bust all-time records, either.

The importance of The Force Awakens lies elsewhere. It lies in reasserting the cumulative force that the Star Wars saga brings in its wake, every time a new film is released even after so many decades.

There have been other films that have raised popular cinema to the level of literature, but these have mostly drawn inspiration from books.

No other franchise purely created for the screen has managed to consistently trigger popular imagination over the decades the way the Star Wars series does, serving up entertainment that is lucrative as it is classy. If ever Hollywood’s moolah savvy culture spawned a franchise that can truly stake claim to the tag of ‘movie-lit’, it has to be the Star Wars space opera.

George Lucas made the first Star Wars film in 1977 (rechristened Episode IV: A New Hope since then, to accommodate three definitely lesser prequels between 1999 and 2005).

At that time, Lucas had no inkling he was setting off a phenomenon. That was a time when Hollywood was truly discovering the new-age scifi. Lucas’ Star Wars along with assorted works of Steven Spielberg would lay the foundation of what Hollywood science fiction would come to be in the decades that followed.

While Spielberg would go on to explore variety with an extraordinary oeuvre, Lucas stuck to expanding the galaxy of his dreams with two new Star Wars sequels over the next years.

By the time Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker was rescuing Harrison Ford’s Han Solo and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia from the lair of Jabba the Hutt in 1983’s Return Of The Jedi, the saga had become too huge for its comfort. Lucas needed a break, perhaps he had no clue how to take the tale forward without diluting its class.

If the cult of Star Wars has become pop literature in the minds of its legions of fans, the way Lucas used the gap years between each set of films has helped. For those who came in late, the release pattern of the films has happened in fits. Episodes IV, V and VI were made first, between 1977 and 1983. Episodes I, II and III released in 1999, 2002 and 2005, as prequels to the original trilogy. What starts with The Force Awakens in 2015 is a sequel trilogy to the original three films, and these new films are episodes VII, VIII and IX of the saga.

There has been a 16-year gap between the first sets of films and the prequels, and a space of 10 years between the prequels and the current set of films. (The gap between The Force Awakens and Return Of The Jedi, whose story the current release immediately follows, is precisely 32 years. The setting of the 2015 sequel, too, is aptly three decades after the 1983 release.)

Lucas’ masterstroke lay in the way he used these breaks. Despite no film releasing in these intermediate years, he used the time to build upon the legend of Star Wars. The gap between releasing 1983’s Return Of The Jedi and Episode 1: The Phantom Menace — prequel that rebooted the saga in 1999 — saw the Star Wars fan base only multiply thanks to associated TV series, radio shows, amusement theme parks and video games. Collector’s edition videos of the films were also released from time to time.

Similar effective strategies were put in place over the past 10 years too, to fill up the decade-long blank between the 2005’s Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith (last released film of the series) and now.

If Star Wars continued to grow in popular psyche, smart marketing helped. Every other Hollywood biggie does the same, you could argue. The difference is not many assume the dimension of movie-lit.

That is where the exclusivity of George Lucas lies.