Star Wars has a reputation for being one of the most divisive mega franchises in the world, and perhaps one of its earliest controversies was how exactly to classify it into a genre. Even from the time of the Original Trilogy, the answer to such a question proved evasive.
But after countless spin-offs, TV Shows, comics, video games and merchandise of every variety, Star Wars has grown more diverse and samples from more genres than ever. Fortunately, the modern movie scene helps offer some perspective that can settle the debate once and for all: Star Wars might just be a superhero story.
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Genres are always difficult to pin down, with no real authority to define them and different methods of classification often failing to apply any sort of objective means for measuring one film compared to another. Perhaps most difficult of all is that many stories intentionally blend genres to blur those lines between them, and Star Wars is probably the preeminent example. Pulling from science fiction pulp stories like Buck Rogers just as freely as the fantasy-inspired tropes from the legend of King Arthur, even the very first film was never going to be easy to fit into a box.
Over the years, resemblances to other genres began to develop. It's hard to watch Rogue One without thinking of war films, and it's almost impossible to view The Mandalorian as separate from the tradition of westerns that bleeds through in everything from the script to the setting to the score. Whatever genre Star Wars most closely resembles, it would need to be the one highly flexible in the stories and characters it can encompass, and that may be why it fits in the superhero genre more than anything.
The MCU gives a perfect example of how easily the superhero genre can mix in elements from other stories. Captain America: The First Avenger is as much a war film as Rogue One is, while Ant-Man pulls inspiration from heist movies the same way Solo does. While drawing from other genres, the MCU films maintain their definitively superheroic bent. They feature individuals with special abilities undertaking epic battles of good versus evil, and while adopting the clothes of other genres, they consistently remain superhero stories underneath all that dressing -- and the same could very well be said for Star Wars.
The Original Trilogy featured a classic hero's journey of Luke Skywalker discovering his own special abilities in order to rid the galaxy of the evil Empire. The prequels took a dark twist on the same journey as it explored the rise of the supervillains who would build that Empire, and it's hard to watch scenes like the Battle of Geonosis with dozens of Jedi clashing against a droid army and not see a similarity to the end of an Avengers movie.
The parallels to superhero fiction only broaden when looking at other Star Wars media, where one can find a task force of powered mutant clones known as the Bad Batch that feel ripped straight from the pages of an X-Men comic. The masked hero of The Mandalorian roams from town to town persistently fighting in favor of his own moral impulses, and along the way, collects a variety of colorful allies and enemies that pad out a full spectrum of fantastical abilities and talents. While there are other genres mixed in, the most consistent one throughout the franchise's history has been that of the superhero movies, whether creators consciously know it or not.
At the same time, defining genres is always an inherently subjective task. Classifying different installments in a wildly variable franchise like Star Wars is bound to come down to a matter of opinion, but it's still interesting how much clearer the parallels between the franchise and that of the MCU and other superhero movies become the longer stories progress.
When A New Hope debuted, it was a year before Superman: The Movie, but in 2021, fans are so inundated with superhero films that comparisons go without saying. Jedi may not be wearing capes or masks as they use their powers to fight the forces of evil, but it's hard to say they're not superheroes.