May 25, 1977. Star Wars opened in 32 theaters across the United States. Nobody knew what was about to happen.
Craig Miller knew it before almost anyone. He was Lucasfilm’s original Director of Fan Relations, working on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back from the very beginning. He wrote press material, created and ran the Official Star Wars Fan Club, oversaw the staff that opened and responded to mountains of fan mail, worked with licensees, created an 800-number telephone hotline for The Empire Strikes Back that accidentally shut down the state of Illinois’ phone system, operated R2-D2 on episodes of Sesame Street, and spent weeks on the set of The Empire Strikes Back. He is called the godfather of Star Wars fandom, the man who worked with George Lucas to connect the franchise to the audience that made it what it became before the internet existed and before anyone had a template for what franchise fandom could look like.
He documented all of it in Star Wars Memories: My Time in the Death Star Trenches, published in 2019, and followed it with More Movie Memories in 2024, covering the rest of his nearly fifty-year Hollywood career after Lucasfilm.
On May 25, 2026, Miller posted a reflection online that settled one of the franchise’s longest-running fan debates:
“It’s May 25th. Astonishingly, it’s been 49 years since ‘Star Wars’ debuted in 32 theaters around the U.S. Over the next several weeks, the number of theaters increased and increased until it was playing on over 1,000 screens. (I don’t know how it can be 49 years. I’m barely that old now.)
This has been an unusually busy week and I’ll talk about it today or tomorrow. But, in honor of the anniversary of the initial release of ‘Star Wars’, here’s a short excerpt from ‘Star Wars Memories’. Perhaps more Star Wars-related stuff later.
A NEW HOPE
‘Star Wars’ famously opens with a crawl, setting the scene, telling us what has gone before.
‘It is a period of civil war, Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire....’
For years, Star Wars fans have been debating whether or not that crawl started with ‘Episode IV’ or ‘A New Hope’. Or both. People insist they saw it when they saw the movie during the film’s opening days.
It didn’t say it.
Neither of them. And definitely not both.
‘Episode IV’ and ‘A New Hope’ were added for the 1981 re-release of ‘Star Wars’, so the film would now match the format of the opening crawl of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’.
Those phrases have been in place ever since.
But in 1977, they weren’t there.”
This is a detail that matters. The opening crawl debate has run for decades, with fans adamant that they saw “Episode IV: A New Hope” in the theater in 1977. Memory is not a perfect record of film history, and in this case the record is clear: the titles were added in 1981. The crawl audiences sat with in 1977 opened directly on “It is a period of civil war” without episode number or subtitle. The mythology was already forming even before the episode designation existed.
Star Wars opened to $1.5 million in its opening weekend across 32 theaters in May 1977. By the end of its first run it had crossed $307 million domestically, becoming the highest-grossing film in history at that point. It expanded from those 32 screens to over 1,000 as word of mouth drove demand that distributors and exhibitors had not anticipated. Fox had so little confidence in the film that they required theater owners to book the Lucasfilm documentary The Other Side of Midnight as a condition of getting Star Wars at all — several exhibitors took the deal specifically because they wanted the documentary.
Forty-nine years later, The Mandalorian and Grogu opened to $82 million domestic over Memorial Day weekend, the lowest opening in Disney-era Star Wars history. It tracked below Solo: A Star Wars Story. The director told a reporter he was not entirely sure why his film was chosen as the franchise’s theatrical comeback. A film that debuted in 32 theaters and became a cultural phenomenon by force of sheer audience enthusiasm is now a franchise whose theatrical return opened below the film considered its worst modern failure.
The distance between those two data points is the story of what the franchise became under corporate management. Craig Miller was present at the creation of something that did not need marketing to become a phenomenon. It needed thirty-two screens and a crawl that did not yet know it would be called Episode IV.
What is your earliest Star Wars memory? Let us know in the comments.
Space marines on a holy crusade across the galaxy. If that sentence got your attention, Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar is your next read. Three books of relentless action Read Justified: Saga of the Nano Templar on Amazon!
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