The announcement came this week that George Lucas, who directed Apocalypse Now (1970) and American Graffiti (1973), but who never realised his one-time dream of a sequence of science fiction fantasies titled Star Wars, has sold his company Lucasfilm to Disney for $4.05m?.?.?.

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Movie history could be so different. It didn’t happen this way, yet so nearly did. The richest film-maker on the planet (his Forbes-estimated fortune is $3.2bn, with half of that pledged as a future gift to charity) never made Apocalypse Now, though he set out to direct it as a documentary-styled feature in 1970, during the Vietnam war and nine years before Francis Ford Coppola. He did make American Graffiti, his calling-card critical and popular hit. And goodness knows he made, and made history with, the Star Wars saga. This week Mr Lucas sold his company to Disney for – smoke-ring three additional zeros – $4.05bn.