When Did the Original Star Wars Become ‘A New Hope?’

The ‘A New Hope’ Change

The first time Lucas’ Star Wars hit cinema screens, as well as its first spate of re-releases in 1978 and 1979, a moment where 20th Century Fox cemented its dominance of the highest grossing movie ever up to that point, there was no “A New Hope” subtitle nor an “Episode IV.” So the inclusion of those qualifiers became the first substantial, yet still relatively discrete, change Lucas made to the picture.

The shift occurred in 1981 during the film’s third re-release. By this time, Lucas’ The Empire Strikes Back had been released the previous year, and with it Lucas settled on explicitly suggesting that audiences were coming into the middle of a “saga,” just like the old Saturday morning matinee serials he would watch as a kid, often out of order or while skipping key installments from week to week.

Hence The Empire Strikes Back’s full title, Star Wars: Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Ergo, to align Star Wars with this idea, the choice was made to include a detail that casual moviegoers generally ignored for the next decade or two: the subtitle of “A New Hope.” It was actually the first in a handful of changes Lucas made to the 1981 re-release of the movie, which also included subtly redone sound effects, more Wookiee noises, and even alternate takes of dialogue that Lucas decided he preferred to what was used in the ’77 theatrical release.

The Implications for a Star Wars ‘Saga’

The full extent of the logic behind Lucas turning Star Wars into a saga, where the then incredibly popular spate of films would be rejiggered as episodes four through six, remains somewhat elusive. Despite the more streamlined marketing suggestions of the 2000s where Lucas asserted during the release of the Star Wars prequels that he always had a clear vision of what each film’s story would be since day one, the truth is the creative process was likely much more fluid, with Lucas giving conflicting accounts of what the original sequels would be or, indeed, how many potential movies beyond the initial Star Wars trilogy he intended to make.

For example, in 1980, the same year that The Empire Strikes Back came out, Lucas told Prevue magazine (via The Secret History of Star Wars) that he was toying with the idea of making two spinoff films after his then developing Star Wars trilogy that would be about Wookies and droids. Indeed, Lucas even suggested the idea would’ve excluded any human characters… and he was also bouncing around the idea of two other Star Wars trilogies. Maybe.

“When I got to working on the Wookiee, I thought of a film just about Wookiees, nothing else,” Lucas said. “So, for a time, I had a couple of odd movies with just those characters. Then I had the other films which were essentially split into three parts each, two trilogies.” Lucas seemed to be grappling with how big his “saga” would become after The Empire Strikes Back’s sequel. And between 1980 and 1983, the idea became increasingly to do two more trilogies—one about Obi-Wan Kenobi as a young man in those early stages and another about Luke Skywalker as an older man who was about the same age as Obi-Wan in the original Star Wars, passing down what he has learned. Lucas even considered an epilogue set of films early on, which could’ve taken the series up to Episode XII! So as a commercial prospect, it became useful to start stressing Star Wars as the “middle” of a larger story. Hence it became Episode IV.