Two of this summer’s big releases highlight the difference between 2026 and the 1970s, when studios took risks on Star Wars and Close Encounters. Exactly 50 years ago, directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were working away on two pivotal genre movies: Lucas was on a soundstage in Elstree shooting Star Wars. Over in California, ... Why Star Wars and Close Encounters wouldn’t get made in 2026
Two of this summer’s big releases highlight the difference between 2026 and the 1970s, when studios took risks on Star Wars and Close Encounters.
Exactly 50 years ago, directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were working away on two pivotal genre movies: Lucas was on a soundstage in Elstree shooting Star Wars. Over in California, Spielberg had just begun filming Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
Fifty years on, and cinema still lives in the fading light from those two movies. In a matter of days, Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian And Grogu goes on wide release. In June, Spielberg returns to familiar territory with Disclosure Day – a sci-fi thriller which isn’t being billed as a sequel to Close Encounters, but even its screenwriter, David Koepp, says it somewhat resembles that 1977 classic’s conspiracy-laced tone.
Star Wars and Close Encounters came out in a decade rocked by political turmoil and energy crises. In a bit of historical synchronicity, The Mandalorian And Grogu and Spielberg’s new UFO movie emerge as fuel prices soar following Donald Trump’s ill-advised bombing of Iran – a decision that will likely define his second term as US President in the history books.
Those parallels aside, the emergence of a new Star Wars and a new Spielberg flying saucer movie highlight how much Hollywood has changed over the last 50 years.
Big ideas
In the mid-1970s, George Lucas was still at the start of his filmmaking career. Around the time he was making the low-budget, nostalgic 1950s hot rod drama, American Graffiti, he began shopping around an idea he had for an epic space opera – an amalgam of Saturday afternoon serials, fantasy, westerns, samurai movies and more besides.
What happened next is the stuff of film legend: Lucas took the concept for Star Wars around several major Hollywood studios including Universal, United Artists and Disney. All passed, with the exception of 20th Century Fox; its boss, Alan Ladd Jr, couldn’t quite wrap his head around what Lucas pitched, but was impressed by the filmmaker enough to invest in Star Wars anyway. By then, American Graffiti had become an unexpectedly huge hit, giving Lucas the creative freedom to make his space fantasy.
Were Lucas a 20-something director working in 2026, he’d face a much greater challenge finding someone to believe in his Star Wars concept.
In 1976, there were eight major studios: Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Columbia, United Artists and Disney. Today, the number has been whittled down through various mergers: we’re now left with Universal, Warner, Paramount, Disney and Sony.
To the list we could add Netflix and Amazon (which now owns MGM); still, the fact remains that there are fewer studios left, and the number is shrinking. In all likelihood, Warner will be swallowed up by Paramount by the end of the year.
All of which means there are fewer companies for filmmakers like Lucas to pitch their ideas to. And worse, all the consolidation and corporatisation means that the studios that still exist are more cautious than ever about where they invest their money. You know the sorts of things that studios like nowadays: things based on comic books, reboots, remakes. If studios invest at all in original ideas, it tends to be in the horror genre, which is comparatively cheap to make.
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When Lucas began pitching Star Wars in the 1970s, what he had was a sprawling treatment that was quite different from the film that emerged nearer the end of the decade. To get to what we now know as A New Hope took Lucas years of developing, rewriting and generally sweating over a typewriter. When Lucas was given his initial budget of about $5m in 1975, he was still working on the script, which wasn’t finished until the following year; even then, the story continued to shift through shooting and editing.
Packages
This is worth bringing up because the way studios now select their projects is different in 2026. As Disclosure Day screenwriter David Koepp recently told me (full interview next month), studios no longer buy scripts and develop them over a period of months or years. What they prefer are ‘packages’, which include a finished script, a director with a proven track record, at least one major actor and, often, some degree of financing already attached.
You’ll see stories about these packages all the time in Hollywood trade outlets. A couple of recent examples include Somewhere Out There, whose combination of spec script and unexciting yet bankable filmmaker Shawn Levy sparked a bidding war. Netflix won.
Or there’s The Brigands Of Rattlecreek: Craig S Zahler’s Black List script, said to be brilliant, has been floating around Hollywood desks for 20 years. It’s now finally attracted the interest of Warner Bros’ independent arm, but that’s because it’s part of a package which includes eminent director Park Chan-wook and a cluster of stars: Matthew McConaughey and Pedro Pascal among them.
To get Star Wars made today, our hypothetical George would need a similar package of finished script and eye-catching actors. But in 1975, Lucas had none of those things. A nerdy filmmaker pitching executives on a vague idea today – with no finished script, no stars, no connection to existing intellectual property – would be laughed out of the room.
Even assuming the 2026 Lucas went back to the drawing board and got together a saleable package, he probably wouldn’t be given the time and space to develop the script further. Lucas wrote multiple drafts between 1973 and 1976, and finding the process difficult, sought advice from his filmmaking friends, among them Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz.
Today, the demand to push projects through the production pipeline (especially among streaming firms) means that studios rarely allow filmmakers to sit for years, developing their ideas. This is likely why there are so many movies on Netflix and Prime Video with interesting hooks but half-baked execution or flat dialogue: the development time that still existed even 10 years ago has been replaced by a rush to churn out more entertainment.
In all likelihood, a modern George Lucas would have to make a low-budget proof of concept in the hopes of attracting interest in his Star Wars idea, which itself would take time and money. Or he’d just give up entirely and move onto something else; Lucas was never that enamoured with his own screenwriting, anyway.
Brief encounter
Winding the clock back to the mid-1970s again, and Spielberg faced a different set of circumstances when he made Close Encounters. He’d long been fascinated by the subject of UFOs, and having made Firelight as a teenager, began trying to sell a film about alien visitation around the time of his 1971 debut, Duel.
The success of 1975’s Jaws gave Spielberg a new level of creative freedom, and off he went to make Close Encounters. It was a sprawling, costly production, with the budget spiralling from an initially-earmarked $9m to almost $20m – half of which was spent on Douglas Trumbull’s ground-breaking special effects. The expenditure was so great that Columbia Pictures, the already-ailing studio signing the cheques, was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy.
As well as the pressure of making a complicated film in the wake of Jaws, Spielberg also had the added weight of a studio’s existence bearing down on him; had Close Encounters been a flop, it may have taken Columbia down with it.
Like Lucas, Spielberg had the time and space to refine his concept. Entire scripts were thrown out; even during filming, new scenes were added and ideas came and went.
Spielberg’s control over Close Encounters was so precise that he personally commissioned and approved the typeface and logo that appeared on the finished poster. He exercised an almost paranoid level of secrecy – so much so that, in the months leading up to the film’s release, the studio’s marketing team had almost nothing to show the public barring a few bits of footage and interview clips.
Few filmmakers have this level of creative freedom today. Christopher Nolan’s an obvious one, of course, but he’s in his mid-50s and 13 feature films into his career. Spielberg may have had a box office phenomenon behind him with Jaws, but he was still given the modern equivalent of $117m (accounting for inflation) to spend on a vague idea about flying saucers. An idea he then spent two years executing in almost total secrecy. He was barely 30 years old.
In modern Hollywood, initial ideas are hard enough to get going in the first place, though filmmakers with enough clout do still get bold projects like Sinners and One Battle After Another made. Untested, weird ideas that have yet to be fully formed – a Flash Gordon-esque space opera, a conspiracy thriller-fairytale about UFOs – are vanishingly rare.
Shrinkage
Look back at the history of Star Wars, and you can see within it the changing face of Hollywood. An idea rejected by Disney is now owned by Disney. What was once one guy’s batty idea is now a multimedia franchise with entire teams of writers and directors working on film and TV projects within it – many of which end up being cancelled. The latest film in the Star Wars franchise, The Mandalorian And Grogu, is a spin-off from a hit TV series, its title assembled by a marketing team to emphasise the presence of the much-loved Baby Yoda.
Disclosure Day, on the other hand, is a return to UFO territory for one of the few filmmakers left who can get an original movie going in the current climate. Certainly, it’s hard to imagine a modern studio taking a risk on something like Star Wars or Close Encounters today.
We could go a step further: the filmmaking environment in 2026 makes it increasingly unlikely that we’ll see any new franchises like Star Wars will emerge in the coming years. Of the top 10 highest-grossing film series on the planet, Star Wars is the only one that isn’t based on a comic or best-selling book (the Fast And Furious franchise was originally based on a magazine article titled Racer X).
As more companies merge and we drift ever closer to a corporate-owned monoculture, there’s less and less creative space left for the next Lucas or the next Spielberg. Storytellers and dreamers with big ideas face an increasingly uphill battle. Our popular culture is all the poorer for it.
NB: This article was amended to include mention of the Fast And Furious franchise in the list of highest-grossing film franchises.
