Both franchises remain commercially dominant in 2026. The Star Wars slate is particularly loaded, with Maul: Shadow Lord launching on Disney+ on April 6th, and The Mandalorian and Grogu scheduled to hit theaters in May. Star Trek, meanwhile, is celebrating its 60th anniversary with Starfleet Academy now streaming on Paramount+ and Strange New Worlds approaching its fourth season. In addition, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley were hired in November 2025 to write and direct a completely new Star Trek film, one unconnected to any previous series or prior development effort. Despite being produced by rival studios, the creative teams behind Star Wars and Star Trek have spent decades embedding affectionate references to each other across live-action films, television episodes, and animated series.
5) Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Image courtesy of Lucasfilm
The 2008 premiere season of Star Wars:The Clone Wars contained one of the most obscure Easter eggs in either franchise’s history. In the episode “Rising Malevolence,” General Grievous commands his assault on Republic forces from the bridge of his flagship while a tactical display runs in the background of the scene. Eagle-eyed viewers discovered that the silhouette visible on that monitor belongs to a Cardassian Keldon-class warship from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The heavy cruiser type was introduced in the Obsidian Order storylines of the 2370s, a fictional warship from a completely different universe that somehow wound up on a battle map in a galaxy far, far away.
4) Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Image courtesy of Paramount Television
The first season episode “A Man Alone” of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine contains a Star Wars reference hidden in an investigative scene. In the episode, Odo (René Auberjonois) examines a murder victim’s schedule as part of his investigation, and the document lists a chartered space flight out of Alderaan Spaceport, a direct lift from the Princess Leia homeworld destroyed by the Death Star in A New Hope. The reference is placed in procedural data that a character is actively reading, rather than a background monitor too small to make out, which gives it a slightly higher profile than most Easter eggs of this variety. Its positioning in a Deep Space Nine episode is also notable because The Next Generation had already embedded an Alderaan reference in its own background screens the previous season, meaning the production team was actively extending an internal joke between two separate Trek series.
3) Star Trek: The Next Generation
Image courtesy of Paramount Television
Star Trek: The Next Generation scattered Star Wars references across its run with a consistency that suggests a deliberate house tradition. For instance, the series pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint,” hid drug-dispensing devices worn on the uniforms of Q’s soldiers that are labeled “Army R2D2 CPO,” a compressed reference to R2-D2 and C-3PO. Season 2’s “Up the Long Ladder” went further, placing a computer screen in Picard’s ready room listing a ship’s mission category as a “Diplomatic Mission to Alderaan.” The reference was later scrubbed from the show’s Blu-ray remaster, with the planet Alderaan replaced by the real star Aldebaran. Then, Season 7’s “Sub Rosa” featured a cemetery sequence that includes a tombstone bearing the name “Vader,” visible to anyone pausing on the right frame. Curiously, another tombstone in the same scene reads “McFly,” nodding at Michael J. Fox’s Back to the Future character.
2) Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness
Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures
J.J. Abrams is one of Hollywood’s most openly devoted Star Wars fans, and both of his Kelvin-timeline StarTrek films contain R2-D2 Easter eggs hiding in plain sight. In the 2009 Star Trek, the droid appears among the debris field surrounding the stricken Starfleet vessels near Vulcan, visible on the Enterprise’s viewscreen during the film’s central crisis sequence. Four years later, in Star Trek Into Darkness, R2-D2 gets sucked out of the Enterprise alongside the crew when the USS Vengeance attacks while both vessels are at warp, appearing briefly in the background. On a red carpet, Abrams explained he first spotted R2-D2 hidden in the mothership of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a child, and saw his Trek films as an opportunity to extend that same chain of homage forward.
1) Star Trek: First Contact
Image courtesy of Paramount Television
The most famous and most elaborate cross-franchise reference in the history of either property belongs to Star Trek: First Contact. John Knoll, the ILM visual effects supervisor on the 1996 film, was simultaneously working on the Star Wars Special Edition theatrical re-releases. His access to a newly constructed digital model of the Millennium Falcon gave him the opportunity to insert Han Solo’s ship into the Starfleet fleet battle against the Borg Cube at the film’s opening. The Falcon appears flying behind the Borg Cube across several shots of the battle, its distinctive silhouette identifiable to anyone watching on a format capable of slow motion and zoom. Knoll has since credited the visual language he developed for First Contact‘s space battles as the direct foundation for the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
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