Typical plotlines involved aliens visiting our planet, such as in 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still and 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though a few, like 1956's Forbidden Planet, did involve deep space travel. While sci-fi films were very popular in the 1950s, in part because of low budgets, most of them were set in contemporary times and were based on Earth. In fact, he originally wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie but could not afford the film rights, and he developed Star Wars instead. These types of media inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars. As a result, space opera fiction was enjoyed by fans in inexpensive pulp magazines, which were much cheaper to produce. Outside of the Flash Gordon serials, studios at the time were uninterested in the significant costs of creating the special effects required for what was, at the time, a genre not widely popular with the moviegoing public. The thrilling adventures of these popular characters were later adapted by Universal Pictures into film serials. (1929) and Flash Gordon (1934), which were read by millions of fans.

By the 1920s, stories featuring elements of space operas were popular in science fiction magazines, and gained even more popularity with the launch of comics strips like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D. Though the term space opera did not gain popularity until the 1940s, the style of the genre long predates the term. Unlike general science fiction, space operas may feature concepts that stray far from hard scientific concepts (e.g., the magical 'Force' of the Star Wars films). Similar to a soap opera, space opera stories were frequently serialized in print and on screen to depict sweeping, epic-length stories. The term 'space opera' is derived from 'soap opera,' which refers to a long serial narrative featuring melodramatic content. box office history is a space opera movie, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).

5th element space opera