Stargate is a military science fiction franchise, initially conceived by Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin. The first film in the franchise was simply titled Stargate. It was originally released on October 28, 1994 by Metro–Goldwyn–Mayer and Carolco, and became a worldwide hit grossing nearly 200 million worldwide.

Three years later, Canadian Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner created television series entitled Stargate SG-1 as a sequel for the film. The Stargate franchise has spawned other media including books, television series, video games, and comic books. These supplements to the film and series trilogies comprise another universe than the series and the film, and have resulted in significant development of the series' fictional universe.

These media kept the franchise going in the interim between the film and series trilogies. In 2008, Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Continuum was released direct-to-DVD, which in total grossed over 21 million in the United States. In 2002, the franchise's first animated series, Stargate Infinity, was released as an introduction to the Expanded Universe.

In 2004, Stargate Atlantis was released as a spin off from Stargate SG-1 and a new Stargate spin off series entitled Stargate Universe will air in the fall of 2009. Stargate productions center on the premise of a "Stargate", a ring-shaped alien device that creates a wormhole enabling personal teleportation to complementary devices located cosmic distances away. Under the control of the United States government, the Stargate discovered on Earth is kept a secret from the public.

This allows storylines to present no contradiction between depicted events and reality, an effect compounded by setting Stargate in the present day, and depicting Earth accurately, with any unrealistic technology originating solely from alien civilizations. These extraterrestrial civilizations are however more often pre-industrial than scientifically advanced, and are almost invariably human. Together, this allows for stories predominated by human interaction in Earth-like environments, an unusual feature for a science fiction franchise.

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