Star Wars Marks 50th Anniversary With Limited-Edition Matt Ferguson Poster Release

Next year, Star Wars celebrates its 50th anniversary with a new theatrical release and much, much more. To accompany its return to the big screen, a new movie poster by artist extraordinaire Matt Ferguson has been commissioned by Lucasfilm. Now, you'll be able to take that poster home, but act quickly, because they won't be around forever.

Poster art has been key to the Star Wars mystique from the very beginning. The 1977 poster by brothers Greg and Tim Hidebrandt perfectly captured the blending of science fiction pulp aesthetics with the zeitgeist of the 1970s, and became an iconic image of the franchise. Later poster art for the series, including the Special Editions of 1997 and the subsequent Prequel Trilogy, was painted by legendary poster artist Drew Struzan. Ferguson is no stranger to the franchise. He was first commissioned to create a poster for the 2020 40th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, and did the same for Return of the Jedi three years later. He's also created posters for The Phantom Menace, Revenge of the Sith, and The Mandalorian and Grogu.

Now, Ferguson has created an all-new poster for the 50th anniversary re-release of Star Wars, the movie that started it all. Although it's now known as A New Hope, that subtitle was added in later revisions of the film, and is thus nowhere to be seen on Ferguson's new poster. It's so committed to the 1977 vibe that it uses the original, trapezoid-shaped Star Wars logo, rather than the more familiar logo seen in the film's opening crawl.

You'll be able to take this new poster home, too. It will be available with both English and Japanese logo treatments, and in normal and metallic inks. The standard English and Japanese editions will be available for $65 USD each, or $125 for both; the metallic ink variants are limited and will set you back $75 each. They'll be available to pre-order at BottleneckGallery.com starting on November 13 at 12 p.m. ET. But don't dawdle; they'll only be available until 11:59 p.m. ET on Thursday, November 19.

How Else Is Star Wars Celebrating Its 50th Anniversary?

+2

The main event for next year's festivities will be a theatrical re-release of the original Star Wars movie in IMAX and other big-screen formats. The original print of the movie has been painstakingly restored to its original condition, without any of the later additions made to it, meaning that it will be seen on the big screen the way it was seen when it first became a pop-cultural phenomenon in 1977. You'll be able to catch it when it hits theaters everywhere on February 19, 2027.