An annual fan observance on May 4 celebrating the Star Wars franchise, its films, and its fandom.
Last updated February 26, 2026 · by the
Holiday Calendar Team
“The first organized Star Wars Day was held at Toronto's Underground Cinema on May 4, 2011.
A fan-driven pun on "May the Force be with you," adopted organically over decades with no founder or proclamation. Disney began observing it in 2013.
Star Wars Day has no founder, no proclamation, and no birth certificate. It runs on a pun. Swap one word in the franchise line "May the Force be with you" and you get "May the Fourth be with you," which lands on May 4.
The earliest print use tied to that date is not a fan flyer or a studio memo. It is a British political ad. On May 3, 1979, the day of the UK general election, workers for Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party ran a notice in the London Evening News reading "Dear Maggie, May the Fourth Be With You. Your Party Workers." It was a pre-election well-wish, not a victory message.
The strangest part is who came last. Fans built the day from a joke and threw the first organized event in a Toronto cinema. The studio that owns Star Wars showed up only after the audience had already made the holiday its own.
DEALS & OFFERS
Long before any cinema booked an event, the joke was just floating around. The earliest uses StarWars.com can point to date from 1978, the year after A New Hope, as Fourth-of-July newspaper gags. The pun was too easy to resist, and people kept reinventing it.
The wordplay was hard to escape. It reached pop culture early, turning up in a 1988 episode of the cartoon Count Duckula and in a 1994 UK Parliament defence debate. None of these was a holiday. They were just the same joke, found over and over.
One reinvention came from inside Lucasfilm. Sound recordist Randy Thom thought of "May the 4th be with you" on May 4, 1982, during production on Return of the Jedi. He shared it with the crew, then wrote it into an annual company message for years.
The day became an actual event in 2011. YouTube comedian Sean Ward and Alice Quinn produced the first organized Star Wars Day at the Toronto Underground Cinema on May 4. The program ran an original-trilogy trivia game show, a costume contest with celebrity judges, and a big-screen reel of fan tribute films. A second edition followed in 2012.
The rights holder arrived after the fans did. Disney closed its purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012, and the next year it began officially observing May 4 with events at its parks. The grassroots gag had become a corporate occasion, and a day no one had founded now had a steward.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
Fans built the day years before the studio claimed it.
No company invented Star Wars Day, and no government declared it; fans assembled it from a joke and the first public event. Disney's later adoption made it the rare commercial holiday that the audience created before the rights holder did.
Star Wars live-action films have a combined theatrical gross of over US$10 billion, the third-highest of any film franchise. The day turns that vast catalog into a single shared release-and-rewatch moment each year.
In 2019 the California Legislature passed Assembly Concurrent Resolution 72 recognizing May 4 as Star Wars Day, tied to the opening of Galaxy's Edge. The resolution recognized an observance that already existed rather than founding one.
BY THE NUMBERS
TIMELINE
It wasn't official so much as it was the first organized event.
GOOD TO KNOW
Archival research by W.R. Miller found the verified ad ran May 3, 1979, before the vote, with no congratulations; the popular May-4 "Congratulations" version is unsubstantiated, and StarWars.com's own history repeats it.
May 25 marks the 1977 release of the original film, and the Los Angeles City Council declared a separate Star Wars Day on that date in 2007. The widely observed holiday is May 4, the date of the pun.
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