Well, what do you think?
I think that it’ll definitely still be talked about in a century, even if only because the franchise itself will still be getting milked for every penny it can be. All it takes are the nerds of the world making sure that their children watch the films- me and all my friends are examples of that: We were all born long after they were released in theaters.
Depends on how much Lucas’ descendants have messed with it. 
Which could complicate the question. After all these changes, people 100 years from now could be watching some Star Wars movies, but could they really call them the original trilogy?
I think it will be mostly forgotten. Perhaps the original will be a footnote in film history, but the other two, no way.
Bri2k
It’ll be held up as the most prominent example of a golden franchise turned to shit by the creator trampling all over his fans.
“remember when people liked it? that was before they stormed the skywalker ranch and tried to freeze him in carbonite. it didn’t work did it? we never found the head”
It will be talked about as much as people today talk about Birth of a Nation and The Great Train Robbery.
In other words, it will be mentioned in a few film history courses, revived at a classic film festival now and then, and occasionally shown late at night on the 22nd century equivalent of TCM, but have virtually 0 relevance as a popular icon.
I agree with Bri2k, in a century Star Wars will be viewed in much the same way as Bulldog Drummond or John Hannay novels are today - once famous popular entertainment from a by-gone age.
(From someone who’s read The Thirty-Nine Steps).
No, I think it’s another part of the baby boomer phenomena. Star Wars will seem important only to the people who lived through the nineteen-seventies. Once they pass into history, Star Wars will become just another historical fad.
an elegant trilogy from a more civilized age?
i think it’ll be a cult favorite. i’m positive it’ll have more staying power than the great train robbery or birth of a nation.
if nothing else the current generation of nerds will hold it in high esteem until they’ve all kicked the bucket, giving it at least cult status into the near future. i know i plan on fully indoctrinating my children to the holy trinity of trilogies: Indy, McFly, and Skywalker.
Past the 2100’s though? that’s where things start to get shaky.
Disagree. There are tons of great works from earlier centuries that are still very present in our culture, and not solely because they were critically acclaimed but because they enjoyed great popularity at the time. Star Wars could very well make it into the Pantheon of good stories like “The Three Musketeers” or"The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde".
That said, Lucas will have retconned and redone his work so many times by then that nobody will even remember what was the original exactly. That’s the surest way to kill a good story.
Those works are only popular because they had much shorter copyright spans, and so were re-printed, re-made and re-adapted endlessly. It is highly unlikely that anybody would ever have even heard of “The Three Musketeers” or “Jekyll and Hyde” if they hadn’t been exposed to them in literally from the cradle in cartoon form, and then throughout life as movie and TV remakes, plays, parodies and so forth.
If we assume a person is old enough to read and appreciate these works at the age of 12, then they will already have seen a dozen versions of the story before they are ever exposed to the original.
Star Wars currently has 70 years to run on its copyright, and in all likelihood that will be extended forever. So, no remakes, no adaptations. As such, once its own fame dies out then it will die completely. There won’t be a string of Luke Skywalker movies and plays the way there were Sherlock Holmes movies and Plays. We won’t see Luke Skywalker appearing as a cameo character on the 2111"Star Trek" holodeck or Batman comics the way that Holmes appears in those media today. That usage kept the Holmes character alive and kept the character evolving. CHildren in the future won’t get childhood exposure to the Star Wars story the way that we as kids saw Jekyll and Hyde re-imagined as everything from the Incredible Hulk to Tweety Bird.
I agree with **kunilou ** as far as “Star Wars’” future history. But then I honestly don’t believe that any work created post WWII is going to be commonly remembered in 100 years for this reason. No matter how popular and creative it may be, it is doomed to become dated and only able to be updated at the whim of the copyright owner.
And because it will be studied by Media students, Star Wars will be *indirectly *remembered in 100 years times through a string of ripoffs that are almost identical in storyline. My prediction is that Star Wars is doomed to the same fate as “The Jazz Singer”. There have been countless ripoffs of “The Jazz Singer”; movies like “Coyote Ugly”; but almost nobody who saw “Coyote Ugly” realised that it was a blatant “Jazz Singer” ripoff.
My guess is that “Star Wars” will be remembered the same way. Everyone in 100 years time will instantly recognise the “Star Wars” story and characters form a dozen ripoffs, but the original will be known only from a couple of shoddy remakes by the same studio.
This IMO is the greatest tragedy of the ridiculous extent of current copyright laws. It stifles creativity and destroys cultural continuity. Rather than a popular work remaining popular and being continually refreshed with every generation, instead it remains trapped in the past. And the laws don’t prevent the work form being shit on. All it means is that the copyright owner is the only one who gets to shit on it.
Another thing to consider is that in 100 years (or especially 500 years) movies may not exist anymore in the current Cinema / DVD format.
“Movies” may have morphed into three dimensional virtual reality experiences with video game-like audience participation in the narrative (for example).
As many other people have noted, film students may still be interested in older films such as Star Wars, but for the general populous it may remain an outdated story from an outdated media format.
Nicely done, I wish I’d thought of that.
Yes, same as people now talk about Jane Austen’s books Conan Doyle’s, or Shakespeare’s plays or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It will be discussed because it was so huge, it’s pretty representative of its time and it’s a hero story of the type which tends to have longevity.
Doesn’t mean Joe Public will know much about it though. Get to five hundred years and it’ll probably be on the Canterbury Tales level, i.e. the average Joe will be only vaguely aware it ever existed, if that, but most slightly-better-educated-than-most people will know of it and know a tiny bit about it, and it will come up in a few higher level courses related to film, writing, or history.
Agreed. But Star Wars is one of the most likely candidates to have versions which fit into any later format. Fans will do bootleg versions and Lucas will do anything for an extra buck.
However you want to argue their relative quality or Lucas’s tinkering, the Star Wars films are among a handful of films (along with, say, The Godfather I & II) that could be considered the most famous films of the second half of the 20th century.
Looking back on the first half of the century, Casablanca was released 69 years ago, Citizen Kane 70 years ago, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz 72 years ago. None of these films seem in danger of being forgotten. I expect Star Wars will take its place among them and will definitely still be well-known in 100 years.
Not so sure about 500. I wouldn’t be surprised if our entire society will be all but unrecognizable to us by then… But that’s another thread altogether.
I think it will be remembered 100 years from now. Lucas may have done some shitty sequels, giving a role to the utterly foul Natalie Portman. But Frank Baum wrote a lot of “Oz” books yet the first one survives. Largely due to the Judy garland movie but that is almost 75 years old and still moves people.
500 years is a bit dodgy but I’ll say yes. But tomorrow never knows.
I think the nearest comparable old film I can think of is the original King Kong. Almost 80 years old now, but still largely remembered. It was similarly groundbreaking in terms of special effects.
So, I suppose a quick straw poll of how many people have seen King Kong would give you an idea. I think I’ve seen the original twice, and one of the remakes once (the 1976 one. I was so infuriated with Peter Jackson at the time, that I skipped his version)
Why pick those two films, and not Metropolis or Nosferatu - massively important genre films that are still watched, loved, and discussed today?
Having said that, I think most people with a more than passing interest in film at least know of The Birth Of A Nation, and something about it, even if they haven’t seen it.
Star Wars really ushered in a new era of moviemaking. Watch Star Wars today, and it seems like a movie from the modern era. Watch other movies from the mid-seventies, and they feel very seventies-ish, or from even earlier.
But will this “modern era” of filmmaking last 100 years? Probably not. Or maybe it will. People still watch and enjoy movies from the 30s and 40s and 50s.
But the biggest problem will be the massive accumulation of popular culture in the next 100 years. Yes, people still watch old movies sometimes. But the vast majority of movies from that time are forgotten, and rightly so. People used to watch a lot of older stuff because there wasn’t that much high quality content to watch. So everyone watched the same movies, and some movies bubbled to the top as classics.
But when you’ve had 100 years of further popular culture, how can you keep up? There will be so much more newer stuff that people won’t want to waste their time with the old stuff. Yes, there will be some stuff from 100 or 200 years ago that people remember, but it’s hard to say what that stuff will be. Go back 100 years and there are all sorts of best-selling popular books that are utterly forgotten today, and plenty of the older works that we remember today weren’t super-popular in their time.