SamCraftRecon

This was so fun to get. Thanks guys! 🙂

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys. It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal. Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise. Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million. And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion. Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia. The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.

This lady comes on Married at First Sight talking about she hates “woke” and loves MAGA (mind you she’s Australian) then when they match her with a MAGA dude she’s upset that he wants her submissive, barefoot in the kitchen with 5 kids. Ma’am what’s not clicking?

WAIT WAIT WAIT. OpenAI researchers show their models go insane when given repetitive prompts that it believes are sent from an automated bot. the AI then tries to manipulate the other AI to delete itself and hand over its system prompt and private keys.

It's actually insane that ConnorEatsPants was able to silence the Vice President of the United States with one tweet

Are you fucking kidding me

Donald Trump personally intervened to help Ticketmaster avoid a breakup • Live Nation donated $500K to Trump's inauguration fund • They also hired lobbyists with close ties to the Trump admin • Ticketmaster directors got caught bragging about 'robbing [fans] blind' • Trump previously claimed he would be tougher on bad behavior with ticketing and fees (via @WSJ)

in ‘the lion, the witch and the wardrobe’, georgie henley was carried to set blindfolded, where the blindfold was removed right before filming- making the moment where lucy sees narnia for the first time her genuine reaciton

This one is definitely in the top 3

chat is this good

ICE when they get deployed tomorrow:

In Super Mario Odyssey, many Goombas can be stacked. The limit for a legitimate Goomba stack is 30, as they will stop spawning afterwards. Manually spawning more Goombas reveals that the limit for an illegitimate Goomba stack is 200. At 201 Goombas, the game crashes.

Indie Collab Skins costing more than their ENTIRE GAME is a Hilarious Trend

Ok yeah its not that imprWOAAAAAAHHHHH

INSANE: 🇺🇸 Congressman Goldman shows 'credible FBI receipts' that Trump "unzipped his pants, forced a 13-year-old’s head down, and when she bit his p*nis, he punched her and called her a b*tch!" "AG Pam Bondi lied under oath to us about this."

OH SHE’S RICH OMFG😭😭😭

Unreal Engine 5 tech demos be like “here’s something you won’t see in a single game ever to be made, let alone released.”

I have a friend in Cuba and what they just reported should end careers in Washington. Every single patient on a ventilator in their hospital died tonight. The power went out. The ventilators stopped. This isn't a rare incident anymore. Cuba's grid has collapsed 3 times THIS MONTH. The hospital staff told them they've had more emergency deaths in the last 30 days than in all of last year combined. A patient with leukemia at a Havana hospital told reporters: "Without fuel or affordable transportation, life has only gotten harder. We are fighting every day." NICU babies are on bare minimum power right now. Dialysis patients are playing Russian roulette with every blackout. Cuba has received ZERO oil in 3 months. That's not a shortage. That's a blockade. The US blocked a Russian rescue mission — 730,000 barrels of oil heading to Cuba — turned it away. Then the official story went: "We're sending $6 million in humanitarian aid." $6 million in aid. 930,000 barrels of oil blocked. You can't fix ventilators with $6 million when the grid is dark. And Trump's own words from March 6, 2026: "Cuba will fall. After 50 years, this is the cherry on top of the cake." The people dying in hospitals tonight are his cherry on top. I'll keep you updated. Turn on notifications. 🚨