Auctioneer Alastair McCrea recently sold an adapted First World War rifle. It didn’t work and was, as he puts it, “incredibly heavy”. He got Dh2.4 million for it anyway – because it was the prop carried by Boba Fett in the original Star Wars trilogy. “He was considered more of a background character,” McCrea adds, “which meant they only made one of that prop”.
Science fiction, fantasy and horror may not be everyone’s passion, but it is precisely others’ obsession with these visually arresting, pop-culture-defining genres that is driving what is fast becoming a popular asset class: movie props – costumes, clapper boards, scripts, posters and original artwork.
“For a lot of collectors, the value lies in a film taking them back to their childhood,” says McCrea, a consignment specialist at UK auction house Propstore. “Films from the 1980s are in a sweet spot right now – people who grew up then are nostalgic and now have a bit of cash.”
Some will need quite a lot of it. Blue-chip movie memorabilia – typically a prop central to a film’s plot – can leave much of the art world in the dust, both in price and rate of return. The axe wielded by Jack Nicholson in The Shining sold a few years ago for the equivalent of Dh734,500.
The most expensive movie prop ever sold, though, is a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, which went for $28 million. Other headline sales have included Marilyn Monroe’s dress from The Seven Year Itch and Steve McQueen’s racing suit from Le Mans.
Truly iconic props are, as McCrea stresses, few and far between – many now locked away in private or museum collections. “One customer bought Christopher Reeve’s Superman cape from us and said he was going to display it, which made me very pleased. Some collectors lock everything away, which is a bit sad.” It is, after all, one of the great pleasures of this particular market: movie memorabilia is inherently entertaining, free from the po-faced seriousness of art or watches.
Some superstar props remain tantalisingly unaccounted for, including Elliot’s pushbike from ET, the gilded gun from The Man With the Golden Gun and an entire Iron Man suit. Many auction highlights have sometimes surfaced unexpectedly, often from a production hand’s attic: the blaster Harrison Ford used in Blade Runner, for example. “You’d be amazed at how little people know about the value of what they’ve got sitting at home,” says McCrea.
That said, as Catherine Williamson, a specialist at Julien’s – Hollywood’s leading mobile memorabilia auction house – explains, there is still a steep sliding scale of prices, and genuine fun to be had well below Dh25,000.
Much depends on the specifics. Was a prop a one-off or produced in multiples? Was it built for stuntwork – likely less detailed, made from now-brittle foam latex – or for close-ups? Was it “production used” or “screen used”, meaning did it actually made the final cut? Was it any lightsabre, or the one Darth Vader wielded when he told Luke, “I am your father”? The latter case explains why Propstore sold that one for $3.6 million last year.
As with art, provenance is everything. “If an item is going to sell for half a million dollars, we have to get it right,” says McCrea. Specialist auction houses now painstakingly screen-match props against high-definition film stills, hunting for telltale scratches and surface details.
Even props that arrive with period-consistent materials, clean paperwork, receipts, Polaroids from the shoot and original tags can fail the final test. Sometimes, Williamson explains, the veracity of a piece simply cannot be guaranteed – and Julien’s has to walk away.
Occasionally, though, the source is impeccable – Julien’s handled David Lynch’s estate last year. In 2024, Propstore helped Anthony Daniels – the actor who played C-3PO – sell off a trove of personal mementos. Daniels had accumulated them during an era when studios largely turned a blind eye to actors pocketing props, seeing little value in holding on to them. Times have changed.
The movie memorabilia market’s origin story is, in retrospect, astonishing – in 1970, MGM sold off the contents of seven sound stages to auctioneer David Weisz for only $1.5 million.
The lot included cars, aircraft, the full-sized sailing ship from Mutiny on the Bounty and about 350,000 costumes. Weisz made his money back eightfold. Studios are considerably more clear-eyed about their assets today, for their own archives or sometimes to sell to offset production costs.
“People who work on movies tend to know the people who collect, and that can bring more desirable props out of the woodwork,” explains McCrea. “But the fact is that studios are much more protective of their assets now. They know they can raise money with them themselves.”
Which is why forward-thinking collectors are already hunting for the market’s next frontier. That might mean props from films that flopped on release, but have since acquired cult status – Ghost World and Big Trouble in Little China, for example.
So far, the market has been dominated by Hollywood productions that either reshaped film history or conquered a global audience. But other cinemas are gaining ground.
“While we haven’t seen much demand for memorabilia from Bollywood films in our auctions yet, that will likely be a growth area in the future,” says Williamson. “Especially if the films receive a more widespread distribution and if the Bollywood studios begin dispersing the property. We’re already seeing growth in the US in memorabilia sales from Hong Kong, Korean and Japanese film productions.”
Bollywood’s failure to have its own MGM moment was, some years ago, cause for frustration among critics – its over-the-top hand-painted posters, in particular, were, as film critic Khalid Mohamed put it, “very badly archived”. Despite ongoing efforts by the National Film Archive of India, demand for Bollywood memorabilia remains niche. For now.
Demand for film memorabilia more broadly is only expected to expand, reckons Williamson. “That growth is definitely more with more contemporary films than the classics, even as streaming means that younger cinephiles now enjoy films without respect to timeline,” she says. And, she adds, with film arguably still the single most dominant form of global media, the desire to own just a piece of its story still resonates.
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