Star Wars Day: how the Force turned 4 May into a pop holiday

Every time 4 May comes round, half the internet writes "May the 4th be with you" and the other half doesn't quite know why. If you belong to the second group, this post is for you. And if you belong to the first, you'll enjoy knowing that the habit started in a way far more mundane than the saga deserves.

The pun that started with Margaret Thatcher

Most people assume the link between 4 May and Star Wars emerged naturally when the first film came out in 1977. Not quite. The earliest recorded connection turned up two years later. On 4 May 1979, Margaret Thatcher won the general election in the United Kingdom and took office as prime minister. The London Evening News ran a congratulatory advert that read: "May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations."

The pun works in English because "force" and "fourth" sound close enough to get an instant laugh out of any native speaker. In most other languages it collapses on contact with translation — which hasn't stopped the rest of the world adopting the date anyway.

For years the pun circulated in fan clubs and forums before exploding on social media in the 2000s. In 2011 came the first organised official celebration — at the Toronto Underground Cinema, in Canada. Lucasfilm and, later, Disney embraced the date and turned it into an institutional event. Today it's the oddest pop holiday on the calendar: it doesn't originate from any release, and it doesn't mark a historic date in the franchise. It was born from a British newspaper advert about an election.

A 32-screen gamble that changed cinema

On 25 May 1977, Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope opened in just 32 cinemas across the United States. Thirty-two. 20th Century Fox wasn't betting big on the film. George Lucas himself was so convinced it would flop that he spent opening day on holiday in Hawaii with Steven Spielberg, who was finishing the shoot on Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

What happened was the opposite. Queues formed round the block. Within weeks the film was in hundreds of cinemas. It knocked Jaws off the top as North America's biggest box-office success in only six months, taking more than $220 million on its initial run — somewhere around $1 billion in today's money.

Lucas's smartest move wasn't creative. It was financial. He gave up his director's fee in exchange for 40% of the box office and all merchandising and sequel rights. The studio agreed without thinking twice, because nobody imagined plastic figures from a science fiction film would be worth anything. That decision is still studied in business schools today. Star Wars merchandising generated billions of dollars in revenue over the following decades — far more than any box-office take.

What Star Wars did to science fiction

Before 1977, sci-fi in cinema was almost always bleak, hermetic or aimed at a patient adult audience. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a masterpiece, but it isn't the sort of film that makes you sit down at ten years old and stare open-mouthed for two hours. Star Wars changed that paradigm.

It was adventure, colour, humour and characters with clear motivations. It was a western, a samurai epic and a medieval fantasy, all at once, only in space. The aesthetic Lucas created — influenced by Ralph McQuarrie's paintings, by Alex Raymond's comic strips and, directly, by the Maschinenmensch robot from Fritz Lang's Metropolis — redefined what science fiction could look like on screen.

C-3PO is a direct reference to the robot from 1927's Metropolis. Lucas never hid it. And what he borrowed from the classical tradition he gave back multiplied to everything that followed — from Blade Runner to The Matrix, from Dune to Guardians of the Galaxy. The visual DNA of half of Hollywood runs through those 32 screens in May 1977.

Growing up with Star Wars

I didn't see Episode IV in a cinema in 1977 — far too many years for that. But I remember the VHS at home, the opening with that John Williams fanfare, those yellow letters sliding up the dark screen before a single image appeared. It felt different from anything I had seen up to that point. The feeling that the universe was vast and that anything at all could happen inside it.

There's something almost Pavlovian about the Star Wars music. You hear the first four bars and you already know you're about to watch something important. Williams created one of the few film scores that work without any images — the 1977 soundtrack is still played in concert halls around the world decades later. It's the kind of work that transcends its original context.

The galaxy in 2026

The Mandalorian and Grogu arrives in cinemas on 22 May 2026 — the first time Din Djarin and Baby Yoda go to the big screen after years on the Disney+ series. It's the sort of release that makes Star Wars Day look strategically placed on the calendar.

Over almost five decades, the franchise has been through the inevitable cycles — the prequels that divided opinion, the sequel trilogy that did the same, the series that recovered some of the magic. But every 4 May, whatever was released before, the same thing happens: fans from three different generations celebrating the same franchise at the same time. A grandfather who saw it in a cinema in '77, a father who grew up with the VHS and a child who found it on Disney+. That's hard to build. Lucas built it.

If you're going to sit down and marathon something today, the canonical sequence starts with Episode IV — A New Hope and runs through to VI. Or — heretical proposal, but a valid one — start with Rogue One, which works as a perfect entry point to A New Hope and is, in a lot of people's opinion, the best film in the expanded universe. But that's a debate for another session.

May the 4th be with you.

If you enjoy science fiction beyond the giant franchises, there's the post on Metropolis from 1927 — the film that, without meaning to, gave C-3PO its shape and moulded the imagination of modern sci-fi. And if you want to understand how real science feeds the best of the genre, the post on 36 years of Hubble and the sci-fi it inspired is worth a read.