Chris Taylor

here-and-now, yet also

Star Wars had become the one movie series for which it is always perfectly acceptable in modern society to discuss spoilers. (Vader, by the way, is Luke Skywalker’s dad.)

How far has this benign cultural infection spread? Is there anyone on the planet not carrying a little piece of Star Wars code in their heads? “We do not know how many individual people have seen a Star Wars movie in a theater,” a Lucasfilm spokesperson told me, “but we do know that there have been approximately 1.3 billion admissions over the six films worldwide.” That seems a conservative estimate, and it would be equally conservative to add another billion home video viewers on top of that, judging by the $6 billion the franchise has earned in VHS and DVD sales over the years. This does not even begin to count video store rentals or the vast market of pirated copies. How many billions more have watched it on TV, or seen an ad, or picked up one tiny piece of the $32 billion worth of Star Wars–licensed merchandise that’s cluttering up the planet? Or, to look at the question the other way around, how many billions, or millions, of people have managed to avoid every last one of these trappings of the Star Wars franchise? And just who are these people?