It's a very popular saying that 'no business is like show business'. You spent many millions of dollars over couple of months making a movie and the moment it hit the theaters if it is a good movie you end up making many millions of dollars within the first weekend itself and the total stack up over hundreds of millions within couple of days. I don't think there is any other industry in the world which has a similar nature in terms of $$$. Well! In some other cases you spend millions making the movie and end up in a nasty loss. Hey! that's show business.

If somebody asks what is my favorite movie, without hesitation the answer is Star Wars ... all 6 films. Not because it's a great movie, but there is a whole lot more than just the movie. There is a virtual world around it. If you are a Star Wars fan you know that the website describes every single element you can find in the film. Every planet, every species, every alien character, every space ship .... including it's origin, type, size, relationship etc etc. In a way this is nuts. You have thousands of pages of reading material. Some times it's way more interesting than reading a Si-Fi book. Also it's truly amazing that George Lucas actually dedicated over 30 years of his life on this 6 films. Hats off to him. Recently I re-watched the entire Star Wars series ... for the 10th time I think. Still I can watch is once again in couple of months time just like watching for the first time. If you are not a Star Wars fan ... just forget it ... you won't be able to understand this :)

Another very interesting Si-Fi, which is another one of my favorites is the StarGate TV series. Originally this was started with a movie and then extended to a TV series and as of this moment there has been a whooping 214 episodes. This also has a similar virtual world around it. Check out Wikipedia and you'll see what I mean. I'm still in the process of watching the episodes one by one ... Yup I have all the episodes. Amazing thing is almost all of the episodes are very interesting. Ohh! Yeah! battles with aliens and big ass alien ships ...

During the past several years there has been many great scientific fiction movies and TV series's. At the time it goes on those dominates the arena, but with time it fades off. I think the reason is there is no 'virtual world' around it. This is where Star Wars and StarGate stands out. I think these two has gone several extra miles on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_SG-1