Keep in mind that that is pre-inflation. Episode 4 made 1.3 billion adjusted for inflation, with a far smaller moviegoing audience.

The new films are just milking every ounce of life out of the franchise. The money they're making is indeed peanuts to what a talented crew could have made.

My point was just that the pattern (subsequent films had significantly lower box offices) was the same. Comparing box offices from several decades ago is hard not so much due to inflation but because there are so many alternatives to watch something today, and the time from theatre to "you can watch it at home" is much much shorter than it used to be. You really need to compare all income sources, but those often aren't published.

At any rate, the message I originally replied to was "do these movies make money though?", and the answer to that is "absolutely yes!" I don't really have an opinion on Star Wars as I didn't care all that much even for the older films. They probably could have been better (and made more money!), but it's the difference between "making a fuckton of money" vs. "making a shitton of money", so to speak. You don't need to make "the best" to actually make money; "good enough" is, well, good enough.