if we do a naive inflation adjustment to 2021 dollars: star wars ANH: $50 million star wars ESB: $100 million star wars RoTJ: $90 million lawrence of arabia

if we do a naive inflation adjustment to 2021 dollars: star wars ANH: $50 million star wars ESB: $100 million star wars RoTJ: $90 million lawrence of arabia: $137 million ben hur: $144 million so yeah, the movies you mentioned had significantly larger budgets, but not massively so (at least compared to ESB and RoTJ). I'd argue the bigger difference is the subject matter. you can do a large 1930's battle without CGI just by throwing money at the problem. there isn't an amount of money you could spend in 1970 to do any of the prequel trilogy coruscant scenes. they probably could have done most of the naboo scenes, though. I'm also not arguing that huge CGI renders are always a good thing. most stories are really just about the interactions between a few people. I do think it's a significant value add for the scifi genre especially, where the world itself is often a character.