Darth Vader's lightsaber sells for nearly $5 million

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Darth Vader's light saber used in ‘I am your father’ duel sells for nearly $5 million independent.co.uk

The lightsaber Darth Vader used in the Cloud City duel — the scene in which he tells Luke Skywalker "I am your father" — sold at auction on Thursday for $4.875 million. Screen-used in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the prop set a world auction record for any Star Wars collectible, according to Heritage Auctions, which also counted it as the record for a screen-used prop from the franchise.

The Ultimate Star Wars Auction assembled twenty-seven other lightsabers alongside Vader's, with material spanning Episodes I through IX and further films and television shows. A single franchise now sustains its own dedicated sale series, the way stamps, coins and comic books have for decades. What the money buys is provenance rather than craftsmanship: the documented presence of one object in one scene, and the word doing the work is "screen-used" — the price is for the hilt the cameras recorded, not for the design. The record nonetheless went to the original trilogy's centerpiece, and the previous benchmark had stood for barely four months.

That benchmark was set by the same house, on the same scene. In July, Heritage sold Luke Skywalker's lightsaber, packaged with the effects rig of the severed hand Vader takes from him in the Cloud City duel, for $3.75 million. In the film, Vader takes Luke's hand; at auction, the hand and the saber went for $3.75 million in July, and the blade that did the severing fetched over a million more on Thursday.