SOME LIKE IT HOTH

These days anybody who makes a sequel to a hit movie can’t wait to tell you that it’s darker and more mature than what came before. When The Empire Strikes Back took the Star Wars saga in a bleaker, entirely unexpected new direction, however, it felt as fresh and new as the original movie had three years earlier.

This was a kid-friendly movie that turned narrative convention on its head by putting its big action set-piece in the first act, before ending on a massive downer that left the story defiantly unresolved. While it made significantly less money than its predecessor – until Solo, it was the worst performing of all the live-action Star Wars – it’s now regarded as the pinnacle of the franchise, the one where storytelling and drama lived up to the visuals. SFX looks back at five big reasons it’s long remembered…

I A NEW ORDER

“DO OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY.”

IT’S ALMOST A CLICHÉ THAT NOBODY expected much from at the box office – not even its creator George Lucas, whose canny move to negotiate the rights to any sequels turned out to be an act of incredible foresight. Once the first movie had become the biggest film of all time, a sequel was inevitable, but Lucas took the bold step of financing the film himself, using “everything I owned” as collateral. It was an incredibly risky move – he ran close to the financial wire on several occasions, with 20th