GEORGE LUCAS, the billionaire creator of the Star Wars films, has announced plans for two spin-off television series set in a far-off galaxy long after the final movie instalment of the space saga.

Lucas, who has earned an estimated $3 billion (£1.57 billion) from the Star Wars films, told a convention in the US that he planned to make an animated series and a live-action series upon completion of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, which is due for release on May 19.

The Star Wars films have generated box office sales of more than $3.4 billion since the first instalment in 1977.

“We’re moving into television, and a lot of ideas are popping up,” Lucas said at the convention in Indianapolis.

A half-hour animated series will expand on the two Clone Wars mini-series that Lucasfilm has produced for Time Warner’s Cartoon Network. The series would probably be produced at Lucas’s new computer animation facility in Singapore.

That would be followed by the production of a live-action series set after Revenge of the Sith but before the original Star Wars, which was subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope. “We’re probably not going to start that for about a year,” Lucas said. “We want to write all the stories for the entire first season all at once.”

The live-action series would focus on peripheral characters that emerged in the Star Wars films, rather than central characters such as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.

Neither series is close to production, and a spokesman for Lucasfilm said that nothing had been made official. “We plan to expand the Star Wars experience beyond the movies and are currently looking at different options for TV products,” a spokesman said.

Lucas, who turns 61 next month, has ventured beyond Star Wars occasionally but has never enjoyed similar success.

He is expected to enhance his fortune greatly with the release of Revenge of the Sith next month, but his most lucrative move came nearly 30 years ago when he retained the merchandising rights for the first Star Wars film.Frenzied sales of tiny Darth Vader figurines and mini-Millennium Falcons earned Lucas hundreds of millions of dollars, which allowed him to finance the next five Star Wars films and pay Twentieth Century Fox a fee to distribute them.

He also used the money to set up service companies specialising in sound, visual effects, computer animation and videogames that have generated many more millions in profits. Lucas’s private empire spans seven divisions with more than 1,700 employees and generates more than $1.2 billion (£630 million) in annual sales.

The business could have been bigger had Lucas not sold his computer graphics division in 1986 to Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computers, who turned it into the phenomenally successful Pixar Animation Studios.

Lucas sold the business to raise cash when his other units were struggling, but returned to animation in 2003 with the creation of Lucas Animation.

Last year the company announced the creation of a production facility in Singapore that is expected to make the first animated Star Wars TV series.

Other successful businesses spawned from Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch include Avid Technology, a digital editing company, and THX, an entertainment technology group.

His best-known project outside the franchise was the Indiana Jones franchise, which also spawned a mildly successful spin-off television series, but other projects have bombed.

Lucas told the convention that in addition to making the TV series he planned to “go off and make movies no one wants to see”.

However, among his projects is a possible fourth film in the Indiana Jones series that would star Harrison Ford.

Lucas owns several businesses that all sprang from his success with the first Star Wars film. They include the sound facility Skywalker Sound, the merchandising group Lucas Licensing, the visual effects unit Industrial Light and Magic and Lucas Arts, which makes computer games.

The computer games business has created several successful Star Wars spin-off titles, such as last year’s Knights of the Old Republic, but has not met expectations that it would become an industry leader.

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