How did director George Lucas become a multi-billionaire with such a slim resume of movies?

His 2nd film American Graffiti was a blockbuster hit, earning $200m from a budget of just $775k

His reward for making Century Fox a fortune was $150k

When he finally got the green light for Star Wars to go ahead the studio offered him a $350k pay rise to reflect the success of his last movie

He turned it down

Instead of accepting a near 300% pay rise he asked to be paid $150k again

With 2 small additional requests

1 — He would keep all merchandising rights
2 — He would also own the rights to any sequels

While it might seem difficult to understand today why the studio willingly handed these rights over to save $350k, the timing worked perfectly in Lucas‘ favour

Fox had just lost an small fortune through merchandising the expensive failure of Doctor Dolittle and had little desire to get back into the merch business anyway

Of course Star Wars would prove to be a galactic hit at the box office but the kicker was the $100m worth of toys that sold following the release

To which George received all of the royalties

The next 5 Star Wars movies went on to earn $3.5b at the box office alone with the merch and toys generating over $12b

And then finally in 2012, Disney offered to pay George $4b to take over the franchise outright

If you have the balls to trade a guaranteed $350k salary add-on for a shot in the dark that nobody else could see the value in

You deserve to be a billionaire!