Star Wars or Star Trek: The Forever War, Scored

The 1977 original invented the modern blockbuster and still rates at the top of our film catalog. Rogue One and Revenge of the Sith prove the machine can still produce genuine highs. Star Trek's film shelf peaks with The Voyage Home and First Contact, both wonderful, neither era-defining, and the Kelvin reboots traded the franchise's brain for its adrenal gland. Star Wars by a parsec.

This is where the fight gets real, because Andor is the best television either franchise has produced and The Mandalorian rebuilt Star Wars for the streaming age. But Trek answers with five decades of sustained excellence: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, the 1966 original that started everything, and Strange New Worlds proving the formula still works in 2026. Star Wars has two great shows. Star Trek is a great show, as an institution. Trek keeps TV.

Knights of the Old Republic is the highest-rated game in our entire catalog at 9.2, its sequel is a stone-cold classic, and Jedi: Fallen Order restarted the single-player tradition in style. Star Trek's best showing is Elite Force, a good licensed shooter from 2000, and an MMO that survives on loyalty. This is the most lopsided category on the board. Star Wars, by orbital bombardment.

Timothy Zahn's Thrawn novels are the gold standard of franchise fiction: Chaos Rising sits at 9.5 in our catalog, higher than any Star Wars film. Trek's novel line is enormous and often lovely (The Lost Years rates a perfect 10 from its readers), but it orbits the shows rather than expanding the universe. Star Wars built its canon on the page for a decade when there were no films at all. That counts. Star Wars takes books.

Star Trek's one soundtrack in our catalog is James Horner's Wrath of Khan, and it rates a perfect 10, so honor is intact. But the Star Wars scores are the most influential film music of the last fifty years: 1977 rewired what a blockbuster sounds like, Empire gave villainy its anthem, and the themes are hummable by people who have never seen the films. Body of work wins. Star Wars.

Our taste engine measures how tightly a universe hangs together across media, and the two franchises could not be more different. The Next Generation has the tightest cross-media neighborhood we measured in either universe: its closest neighbors are Trek films and Trek novels at distances most franchises never reach. Trek collapses inward toward its TV core, one coherent thing. Star Wars does the opposite: the 1977 film's nearest neighbors are novels and games, not other films, and KOTOR sits closest to books and prequel-era stories. Star Wars is not a film series with spin-offs. It is a universe where the films are just the loudest room.