The latest Marvel superhero blockbuster, Guardians of the Galaxy, is a science fiction film, so we all know what it's going to entail: an exhausted band of survivalists fighting zombies on a post-apocalyptic Earth. Or maybe not. That grim scenario may have been the norm for cinematic science fiction over the past decade, but Guardians of the Galaxy seems to be taking a different tack, from its rakish title onwards. Judging from the trailer, it's got interplanetary dogfights, laser guns and jet packs. It's got a talking tree and a gun-toting raccoon. It's got a green-skinned Zoe Saldana, and Andy from Parks and Recreation playing a daredevil outlaw called Starlord. And instead of being set on Earth, it hops between a host of far-flung worlds.

It is, in short, the sort of flashy, pulpy, sci-fi epic that could be called a "space opera" – and it's not alone. JJ Abrams is directing a new Star Wars film, and several Star Wars spin-offs are in preproduction. The Wachowskis have made Jupiter Ascending, in which Mila Kunis is informed by a pointy-eared Channing Tatum that she's actually the queen of the universe (or something). A new Netflix TV series of Star Trek has been rumoured. And Christopher Nolan is sending Matthew McConaughey through a wormhole in his new film, Interstellar. Could the space opera be making a comeback?

"I would like to think it is," says Dr Keith M Johnston of the University of East Anglia, the author of Science Fiction: A Critical Introduction. "It all depends on how well Guardians of the Galaxy does, and how much fun it is, because that's what space operas are: they're more fun and less solemn than other sci-fi. They've got that melodramatic flair, that slightly swashbuckling feel to them, and the sense that there are different civilisations and possibilities out there. There has been a real dearth of this kind of work in cinema recently."

Kryten from Red Dwarf

There certainly has. And it's a dearth that's been tough on those of us who can remember when Star Wars came out in 1977. After George Lucas had proven just how much money could be made from a good old-fashioned space opera, we had Flash Gordon, Battle Beyond the Stars, Dune and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. On television, we could gorge on Doctor Who, Blake's 7, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Battlestar Galactica, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and, later in the 1980s, Red Dwarf and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As different as they were in tone and quality, all of these films and series were thrilling assurances that life on Earth was a mere fraction of what was going on around the cosmos. If we just travelled far enough, we would have fabulous adventures on countless habitable planets with representatives of countless other races. True, we might end up shooting a few of those representatives, but we'd have love affairs with the others, all of whom would look suspiciously like human beings with lots of make-up on.

Alas, the subgenre waned in the late-90s and the early noughties. Babylon 5 finished in 1998, Farscape in 2003. Joss Whedon's Firefly managed to stay on air for a mere 11 episodes in 2002 and 2003, and the last Star Trek series, Enterprise, was cancelled in 2005, having already mutated from an optimistic programme about traversing uncharted territory to a militaristic one about hunting down terrorists. The rebooted Battlestar Galactica, likewise, was no longer the cape-swishing space opera it was in 1978, but a weighty commentary on the war on terror. On the big screen, the Star Trek films ran out of steam in 2002 and the Star Wars prequels were … well, they were the Star Wars prequels.

There were a few attempts to revive the space opera afterwards, but, unless you count Avatar, none of them got off the ground. Green Lantern, Serenity, and The Chronicles of Riddick flopped, and John Carter redefined flopness, partly because Disney's executives were so reluctant to sell it as a space opera. First, they dropped the "Of Mars" qualifier from the title. Then, they opted for a poster featuring a lone figure in a desert landscape (much like the Serenity poster), with no sign of slinky Martian princesses or four-armed giants. "They were almost embarrassed by the fact that it was a science-fiction film," says Johnston, "which is odd when you're marketing a science-fiction film."

Transformers. Photograph: Paramount/Everett/Rex Features

To be fair to Disney's marketing maestros, space operas were several light years out of fashion at the time. After all, for the past decade, science fiction films have either revolved around the ruinous results of human folly (Wall-E, I Am Legend) or around similarly destructive alien invasions (Cloverfield, Transformers). And they haven't strayed too far from Earth itself. The 1990 Total Recall went to Mars; the 2012 remake went to Australia. Even JJ Abrams' Star Trek films were notably lacking in star-trekking, betraying the original series' rhetoric about exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and civilisations. As for getting to know the denizens of extraterrestrial realms … were we supposed to be curious about the baddies in Oblivion or Pacific Rim or Edge of Tomorrow? Nope. They were just baddies. They existed to kill or be killed.

It can't be a coincidence that this trend flourished in the years following 9/11. When the US was sending its young men and women to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, no Hollywood producer wanted to suggest that it was exhilarating to zoom away to an alien domain, nor that the natives there could become your friends. According to Dr Mark Bould, a reader in film and literature at the University of the West Of England, Hollywood had other messages on its mind.

Battle Los Angeles

"After 9/11, alien invasion narratives such as Cloverfield imagined the US as the innocent victim of an irrational attack," says Bould, the author of Routledge's Science Fiction Guidebook. "And even if we can believe Spielberg's claim that his War of the Worlds was intended to show Americans what 'shock and awe' felt like, it nonetheless also presents the US as innocent. Battle Los Angeles does much the same, while panicking about the Latinisation of California and working hard to reinstate white patriarchy as natural leadership. Cowboys and Aliens is even more bizarre in its racial fantasy of whites and native Americans teaming up to fight space aliens who have invaded their land."

Middle Eastern conflicts aside, other factors have been working against the space opera lately. For one thing, real-life space travel hasn't had the media coverage it did when the first space shuttles were launched in the early 1980s. For another, concerns over climate change have made global devastation the hot sci-fi topic. Besides, film-makers found that they didn't need the space opera in order to stage fabulous adventures in weird and wonderful distant lands. "A lot of that work was being done by fantasy cinema," says Johnston. "Space opera has always had a fantastical, swords-and-sorcery element, but there wasn't room for it while the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter films were coming out, not to mention Percy Jackson, The Golden Compass and even Pirates of the Caribbean. Fantasy-based work was so dominant that sci-fi struggled to keep up."

Now, though, it could be science fiction's turn to deliver romance, derring-do and scaly monsters once again, especially as post-9/11 anxieties begin to fade. "I would see space opera as providing an opportunity to return to the kind of colonial adventure fantasies that underpin Star Wars," says Bould, "but which might have seemed too insensitive during a period of more obvious US/western imperialism."

And then, of course, there's the money that space operas can rake in. "The real driver is the desire to develop and expand multimedia franchises," says Bould. "There's been a number of pieces in the trade press lately about films having massive opening weekends in the US and then collapsing. Five years ago, one would expect a movie that opened really big to see a 30 to 40 per cent drop-off the following weekend, but this summer pretty much everything – Godzilla, The Amazing Spiderman 2, X-Men – has seen a 60-plus per cent drop-off, and this does seem to be a consistently developing trend. Consequently, major-budget productions have to find new ways to get viewers to fork over cash – not just via merchandising, but by expanding story worlds across other media: TV, games and so on. Space opera is a natural for this. It offers many worlds, many narratives, many characters, many platforms." Still, as long as it offers many talking trees and many gun-toting raccoons, who's complaining?