After starting as a movie, Stargate became a sprawling franchise, including several TV shows, but what are the Stargate movies in order and the TV shows that followed? Stargate's success led director Roland Emmerich down the path of increasingly expensive disaster movies like Independence Day and 2012. In hindsight, his 1994 sci-fi blockbuster starring Kurt Russell and James Spader is almost small-scale compared to his later work. While Stargate could have led to big-screen sequels, the franchise's future came on television instead.