5 Movies That Blatantly Ripped Off Star Wars & Got Away With It

Published Sep 14, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

Sky Blanton is a Movie Contributor at ScreenRant with professional experience covering movies, television, and pop culture. Her published work spans news, interviews, features, and opinion pieces, with a focus on film, franchise storytelling, and the entertainment industry.

She earned her bachelor's degree in Communications with a concentration in Professional Writing and a minor in Business Writing from Southern New Hampshire University.

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Hollywood has spent decades borrowing from Star Wars, but every so often, one of those movies takes so much for it that calling the result "inspired" feels a little generous. The ragtag heroes, strange alien worlds, oppressive empires and battles between good and evil became part of the language of blockbuster science fiction. Plenty of movies have those plot tools. Far fewer have managed to use them so heavily without being remembered primarily as Star Wars copycats.

Influence can show up in more than a spaceship or a laser. Sometimes it is baked into the characters, the story structure, or an entire world. The movies on this list borrow enough recognizable pieces to make the connection hard to ignore, but each one also brings something that completely changes the watching experience. A different genre, a stranger aesthetic, a darker tone, or maybe even just a cast of characters that audiences cannot get enough of.

To say that they "got away with it" doesn't necessarily mean every movie was a box office hit. Some succeeded immediately, while others took years to find their audience. What they have in common is that their Star Wars influence is one of the more interesting things about them. You can spot where the ideas came from, but you can also see why these movies have stuck around.

5 Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Directed by James Gunn

Peter Quill doesn't exactly look like someone destined to save the galaxy. He is a wisecracking outlaw with a spaceship, a mysterious past and a tendency to get himself into trouble. When he crosses paths with Gamora, Rocket, Groot and Drax, their problems quickly become bigger than any of them can handle alone.

Their journey carries them through alien worlds, criminal underworlds and an intergalactic conflict that keeps escalating. The group starts as five people with very little reason to trust one another, yet their battered ship gradually becomes a home. Quill's charm, Gamora's guarded nature, Rocket's attitude, Groot's loyalty and Drax's literal-mindedness give the ensemble the same kind of chaotic chemistry that makes for a fun adventure in space.

James Gunn then takes Guardians of the Galaxy and pushes the film in a direction that Star Wars never could. Bright colors, comic-book humor, bizarre aliens and Peter's obsession with the music of his childhood give the movie a personality that comes from somewhere else entirely. A fight can turn into a joke, a joke can turn into an emotional moment, and a 1970s pop song is suddenly apart of the main story.

Audiences embraced that combination. Guardians of the Galaxy earned more than $770 million worldwide and transformed a relatively obscure Marvel team into one of the MCU's most recognizable franchises. Whatever familiar ingredients Gunn started with, audiences left talking about Peter, Rocket, Groot and the rest of the Guardians.

4 Treasure Planet (2002)

Directed by John Musker & Ron Clements

Treasure Planet's source material predates Star Wars by more than a century. However, Disney's 2002 animated adventure adapts Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, moving away from the high-seas action, and dropping it in the middle of outer space. Sailing ships have been replaced with solar-powered galleons and pirates with intergalactic crimes.

Jim Hawkins is a restless teenager who longs to escape his ordinary life and gets swept into a dangerous adventure after discovering a mysterious map. He travels through alien worlds aboard the RLS Legacy, forms a complicated bond with John Silver and gets his own futuristic flying vehicle in the form of a solar surfer. B.E.N., meanwhile, fills the eccentric robot sidekick role. The parallels reach well beyond the basic premise and into the characters and visual language of the adventure.

Disney never tried to hide the mash-up. The movie keeps the clothing, ships, terminology, and adventurous spirit of an 18th century pirate tale, while also surrounding them with futuristic technology, alien civilizations and the kind of space sports audiences come to expect from space opera.

Treasure Planet may have flopped financially, but its Oscar nomination and enduring cult following have given it a legacy far stronger than its original box office performance suggests. It may not have made the studio its money back, but it is one of Disney's most fondly remembered sci-fi experiments.

3 Serenity (2005)

Directed by Joss Whedon

Captain Malcolm Reynolds spends most of his time trying not to become the hero of anyone else's story. He flies a battered ship, takes whatever jobs will pay and keeps his small crew moving ahead of the Alliance, a government powerful enough to control much of the galaxy.

Mal's history makes that independence harder to maintain. A former solider turned smuggler, he knows how to fly, fight and survive, but he has little interest in joining another cause. The Serenity shows that attitude. Its cramped corridors, worn surfaces and constant mechanical problems make the ship feel lived in rather than a perfect set, while the crew treats it as both home and a form of transportation.

The Alliance eventually gives Mal a reason to stop running. River Tam's connection to the government exposes a darker energy than the crew originally expected, forcing them into a conflict that they cannot outrun. Suddenly, the smugglers who spent the movie trying to stay out of trouble have a reason to challenge the people in charge.

Serenity earned only about $39 million worldwide, making its later reputation all the more striking. The movie became a cult favorite despite its modest theatrical run, and its characters and battered ship remained important to that affection. Mal may share some familiar qualities with the galaxy's most famous space rogues, but the world around him belongs entirely to Serenity.

2 The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)

Directed by David Twohy

Riddick begins as the kind of person most people would prefer never to be around. He is a wanted criminal, a dangerous survivor and someone who has spent years avoiding anyone powerful enough to put him in a cell. The Necromongers make that increasingly difficult by conquering planet after planet and demanding that entire populations submit to their religion or die.

Riddick soon learns that the interest in him goes much deeper than just his reputation. His Furyan heritage connects him to an ancient prophecy, placing him directly in the path of the Necromongers and their Lord Marshal. A man who has always looked out for himself now has a reason to care about a war that stretches long across the galaxy.

Enormous ships, occupied worlds, warrior armies, and religious conquest all give the story the scope of a space epic, while Riddick remains stubbornly uninterested in becoming a conventional hero. He doesn't want followers or a throne. He wants to survive, even as circumstances keep forcing him toward a role far larger than he ever wanted.

The Chronicles of Riddick earned more than $115 million worldwide and kept the character alive beyond the 2004 movie. Nearly a decade later, Riddick returned to theaters, showing that audiences were still interested in following one of science fiction's nastiest antiheroes.

1 The Fifth Element (1997)

Directed by Luc Besson

Few '90s sci-fi movies are as immediately recognizable as The Fifth Element. Luc Besson fills it with alien civilizations, interplanetary travel, ancient forces and a battle that could determine the fate of Earth. Korben Dallas, a former soldier turned cab driver, is the unlikely man caught in the middle when Leeloo enters his life.

Her arrival was foretold thousands of years earlier, and Father Vito Cornelius had spent his life preparing for the moment she would be needed. Zorg has his own plans for the coming conflict, complete with an army and a very personal interest in controlling what happens next. Besson takes those enormous ideas and gives them an equally extravagant setting, filling the future with crowded cities, alien civilizations and technology that feels almost as imaginative as the people using it.

Jean-Paul Gaultier's costumes, the Mondoshawan aliens and Ruby Rhod's flamboyance make the world feel more like a comic book brought to life than a conventional sci-fi adventure. Even the Divine Diva's opera performance turns a crucial moment in the story into one of the strangest set pieces in '90s sci-fi.

The film earned more than $260 million worldwide before becoming a cult favorite. Its influences are easy enough to spot, but Besson's visual excess and unmistakable characters gave The Fifth Element an identity audiences remembered long after the similarities faded.