There’s an odd little article on USA Today this week that suggests Halo is trying to mimic Star Wars in its spin-offs and merchandising. If you want to see some numbers for the franchise it’s a good read, but the article is missing a crucial link: how comic books + action figures + books + sequels + movies = Star Wars.

To be fair, I understand the correlation. Few story worlds have captured public imagination quite like Halo has, but there have been enough of those things lately to realize that Star Wars was no unique phenomenon. Bear with me people. If you take a look at what I’ll call popular story worlds today, they have all been marketed in similar fashion across various media. Harry Potter has spinoff books, figures, video games, children’s toys, and on and on. Lord of the Rings has a similar brand identity. Twilight has completely changed the town in which the story takes place, taking it from a small town to a major tourist location.

What we might be able to say more accurately is that Star Wars is the first of these popular-story-worlds-turned-moneymaking-machines that has survived into the modern age. Comic book heroes took their sweet time getting here, and Lord of the Rings was so long in the making, the movies that is, that many thought it would never happen. But George Lucas did a great job turning Star Wars into more than just a great movie trilogy.

As long as people can find a way to monetize a story, we’ll be hearing this argument. Is it the next Harry Potter? The next Twilight? The next Lord of the Rings? It’s not any of those things, just the next enchanting narrative that got exploited for mass consumption.