The final scene demonstrates what's most important about Star Wars...
... that Disney can sell action figures to children.
shareIndeed. The Porgs are proof positive of this. They serve no plot purpose whatsoever, they exist purely so Disney can sell toys.
shareYes, the business rationale for designing and showing a commercial movie (for adults it's novels, soundtracks, games, and collectible figures. :P).
But this has always been the rationale since the earliest Star Wars movie - use the it to sell mechandise keeping children primarily in mind. How many cute/weird characters were depicted and sellable in toy form in "A New Hope"? I count maybe 8 creatures/robots and maybe 9 human type characters. A check reveals that Kenner company released a total of 21 characters as figures over !977-78. Apparently more than 100 figures had been released by 1985. It's sort of been assumed that a part of Star Wars is the merchandise - popularity converted into a demand for action figures plus other materials.
I don't think Star Wars was made to sell toys originally. In fact, the toys weren't even available until months after the film's release, leading to Kenner selling the cardboard backing with promise of action figures to come. The overwhelming popularity of the merchandise is what drove George to focus on that as time went on, but in the beginning it was about the storytelling.
shareI think Lucas wanted the film to succeed both as a story and as a pop culture activity. As you say there was a lag as to the financial potential of the films, but Lucas was actually thinking about this before anyone in 1975. Before the first movie came out in 1977 (before really production started on that movie) George Lucas foresaw the possibility of making money from toy and other paraphenalia in view of a predicted doubtful profitability of ticket sales from the movie screenings. The results though exceded expectations, but apparently overall it was a slow process to convince industry that Star Wars was here to stay.
"Lucas gained control of licensing and merchandising rights before "A New Hope" was even released. This smart move ultimately turned him into one of the most successful people in the entertainment industry.
This is the path that George Lucas took that turned him into a billionaire.
[...]
Convinced the film would be a flop, Fox let Lucas pass up an additional $500,000 in directing fees in return for keeping licensing and merchandising rights for himself. This was great for Lucas, but terrible for Fox."
- http://www.businessinsider.com/how-star-wars-made-george-lucas-a-billionaire-2015-12/?r=AU&IR=T/#a-new-hope-was-released-on-may-25-1977-it-shattered-all-expectations-with-a-gross-of-7754-million-worldwide-but-it-wasnt-this-number-that-really-made-george-lucas-rich-6
"Nineteen seventy-five is now a long time ago, some 40 years before millions of us teared up at the sight of an old man in the Miillennium Falcon, before anyone had heard of a holiday called “May the Fourth be with you.” But that’s the year when a young director named George Lucas and his producer, Gary Kurtz, were trying to convince their skeptical studio, 20th Century Fox, to approve a modest budget for their next movie, then called “The Star Wars.”
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As they ran out of time for approval, Kurtz says that he and Lucas made a desperate back-of-the-envelope calculation: Any movie with that title would make as much as $8 million in ticket sales to science-fiction fans—if the filmmakers were lucky, maybe $12 million.
That was enough to convince Fox to throw that much at the movie. But of course, the full size of the business empire built around Star Wars dwarfed Lucas’s 1975 imaginings. Eventually, it even dwarfed the profit Fox made from Lucas and Kurtz’s movie."
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/05/04/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing-how-star-wars-makes-its-billions/
"Outsiders have always underestimated the longevity and appeal of Lucas’s galaxy far, far away. After the first movie became a cultural phenomenon, when toy companies were selling 24 million Star Wars action figures a year, Lucasfilm still struggled to sell merchandising rights for the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The original movie was seen as a fluke. Then in 1983, after Return of the Jedi seemed to wrap up the series, toy sellers told Lucasfilm executives that “Star Wars is dead,” preferring to stock action figures from G.I. Joe and “Masters of the Universe."
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/05/04/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing-how-star-wars-makes-its-billions/