Filmmaking history has been bartered off to a phantom menace lately, with a camera used to shoot ‘Star Wars – A New Hope’ (1977) being auctioned for a record-breaking $625,000 in Beverly Hills, California, to an undisclosed buyer.

The Panavision PSR 35mm camera, which was owned by Hollywood actor Debbie Reynolds, went during the auction at Reynolds' film memorabilia collection. The Oscar-nominated actor, who is the mother of Star Wars' Princess Leia, Carrie Fisher, decided on the sale after plans to open a museum went over to the dark side.

Sold by Hollywood memorabilia dealers ‘Profiles in History’, the fully functional camera went for more than three times its $200,000 estimate and broke records for both Star Wars memorabilia and vintage Hollywood film studio cameras sold at auction. The lot also included accessories and a photograph of George Lucas filming with the equipment on the Star Wars set.

The previous record for an item from Lucas's cash-cow film production series was $402,500 in 2008 for a miniature TIE fighter model used in the first film. A Darth Vader helmet from 1980's The Empire Strikes Back went for $70,000 in 2003.

The camera's high sale figure suggests interest in Star Wars remains high more than three decades after the release of the first film in the series. By comparison, another Panavision camera owned by Reynolds and used during the filming of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was sold for $70,000 at the same auction. A much older camera from 1918, which was once used by Charlie Chaplin, failed to sell after buyers balked at the minimum $200,000 price tag.