Star Wars and video games...

It's pretty safe to say that most of us liked Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, but we didn't like certain things about the film. The complaint at the top of the list has been acting and the delivering of lines. While this is a legit complaint, I don't think all of the blame should be placed on the actors' shoulders.

As far as top directors go, many people would have George Lucas near the top of the list. This is most likely due to his films that make tons and tons of money. However, Lucas has never been a strong writer and when it comes down to it, he's never really done any films that weren't heavy with special effects.

He did direct American Graffiti, but let's be real here, that cast was great. Richard Dreyfus, Ron Howard, Harrison Ford and McKenzie Phillips is pretty much an all-star cast for that time. But this was a movie that he didn't write.

George Lucas is known for two things at this point. The Star Wars movies and his production company Lucasfilms. And when anyone talks about the Star Wars movies, most all of us agree that Empire Strikes Back was the best one and I believe that was the only one of the franchise that he had help in writing.

Episode I and II weren't the best movies in the world, but they still made money and were somewhat entertaining. Again the writing was horrible, but the special effects were awesome and Yoda fighting was too cool. Episode III was much better, but this was mostly due to Lucas taking time to write the script before starting to film the movie. It was said on several entertainment shows that during the filming of Episodes I and II that they were writing the script just days before shooting. Writer's block would have destroyed the production, so you might wonder how much better those films could have been.

It seems like he rarely directs a movie, but he does rake in the cash with Lucasfilm. Lucasfilm creates a huge animated film every now and again and they also have their hand in several video games for various console systems like the PS2 and Xbox. However, many of the games that Lucasfilm produces revolves around the Stars Wars movies. Star Wars: Battlefront was a pretty solid shooter. There really wasn't much to it, but fighting all of those old battles from the Star Wars movies were cool.

One of the reasons why Lucas is not be making many films these days might be due to the fact that the video game industry is a bigger industry than making movies. I know it seems hard to believe, but it is and I'm a product of it. A good video game is like a good book only the imagination is provided for you.

And on top of that, you don't have to pay actors $20 million dollars just to show up and provide crappy lines that you wrote yourself.

Instead a video game can probably be produced on a budget of just a couple of million dollars and big time actors can provide voiceovers for practically nothing. Then the games are sold for around $50. Muliply that by a few million copies sold and that's a healthy profit. That also might be just for the PS2. Add in an Xbox and PC release and it gets even higher. A company might be looking at a profit that's 75 times what it cost to produce.

And that's the formula for a billion dollar video game industry. An industry Lucas seems more at home in than movie making.