The 1977 key poster painting led Heritage’s $7.71 million Hollywood & Entertainment sale and reset benchmarks for both Star Wars memorabilia and poster art.
By Intelligent Collector Staff | December 11, 2025
Movie-poster art occupies a complicated space in collecting: it begins as commercial advertising, but the original artwork behind the best-known images can carry the same weight as illustration and entertainment-history artifacts. Heritage Auctions’ Dec. 9–10 Hollywood & Entertainment Signature® Auction offered a clear example of that shift, led by a record-setting Star Wars painting that pushed poster art into a new pricing tier.
The top lot was Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope (TCF, 1977), Historic Half Sheet Key Poster Artwork by Tom Jung, which realized $3.875 million. Heritage described the result as the most valuable piece of Star Wars memorabilia sold at auction and the highest price ever achieved for movie poster art. The two-day auction totaled $7.71 million across more than 600 lots, with Heritage reporting 2,600+ international bidders participating.
The appeal of this specific work is rooted in its role in the franchise’s visual history. The press release characterizes Jung’s painting as the first widely published image used to promote Star Wars, making it foundational not only to the film’s marketing but also to how audiences first encountered the story’s look and tone. Provenance was also central to the offering: Heritage said the painting was consigned directly by the family of producer Gary Kurtz, adding a clear line of ownership that becomes especially relevant as prices move into the multi-million-dollar range.
Heritage also positioned the sale within a broader set of franchise benchmarks, comparing it to previous headline Star Wars results including the screen-matched “Red Leader” X-Wing filming miniature that brought $3.125 million through Heritage in 2023, and Darth Vader’s lightsaber at $3.654 million. The comparison underscores how the top end of entertainment collecting increasingly treats key art, props, and production artifacts as peers competing for the same top tier of buyer attention.
Other Star Wars material in the auction included a screen-matched Ewok Village matte painting from Return of the Jedi that realized $162,500, according to the release. In that context, Jung’s painting reads less like an outlier and more like a statement about where collectors are placing value: on the earliest, most defining imagery — the pieces that helped create the public identity of a film before it became a global franchise.
Source: Heritage Auctions press release (December 11, 2025).