One of the finest sci-fi films ever made already arrived in 2026. Genre fans everywhere had their brain chemistry rearranged by Project Hail Mary, and the calendar kept giving after that.
Spielberg showed up with Disclosure Day. Pixar handed over a lovely little slice of sci-fi with Hoppers. Netflix threw The Terminator at Predator and named the result War Machine. And Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die turned out to be genuinely, madly, deeply brilliant.
There’s more waiting in the back half of the year. Considerably more.
Serious talent keeps gravitating to sci-fi on both sides of the camera, and what’s left of 2026 delivers an old master’s comeback in Ridley Scott, the third instalment of a new master’s hard sci-fi saga, colossal IP swings, plus a handful of originals and adaptations worth your attention. Whether any of it can dethrone Project Hail Mary is a legitimate debate. According to the hype machine, at least two challengers are on the way.
Two quick pieces of housekeeping first
For its 35th anniversary, Terminator 2: Judgment Day is back in theaters on August 28. No fresh footage. No after-the-fact 3D conversion. Not a frame of it has been tampered with.
Which is exactly the reason to catch it on a big screen, above all if you missed your shot the first time around.
While we’re at it: The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping will show up on plenty of sci-fi lists, though the dystopian prequel makes for an awkward fit beside more traditional genre material. Settle that one among yourselves.
Adam Wingard shrinks the scale and it works in his favor
Two Godzilla movies deep, Wingard is stepping away from Kaiju punch-ups and teaming back up with writer Simon Barrett and A24 on something far more compact. Ironically, Onslaught is an allegorical piece about societal trauma — which, franchise origins notwithstanding, his Godzilla films never were.
It also shares a universe with The Guest.
Some have already labelled the film provocative for how political it is, but exploitation cinema is a language Wingard speaks fluently, and a sci-fi/horror hybrid pitched in that key is an intriguing proposition.
Adria Arjona — who turns up next in Man of Tomorrow — plays a military veteran trying to shield her family from a unit of genetically engineered super-soldiers, set in the very town where The Guest unfolded. Dan Stevens returns under a new name, as does Wingard’s trademark hyperviolence and knack for unexpected depth.
The violence and the sheer entertainment value dominated early reactions, which reached for Terminator and Die Hard as reference points. Frankly, the Universal Soldier-style cyborg villain has been dormant for far too long. The Guest set a high bar, but everything points the right way.
Taika Waititi has something to prove, and Ishiguro is the test
Waititi occupies an odd place in the culture. The man has made excellent films (and television, for that matter), yet the widely panned self-indulgence of Thor: Love & Thunder, trailed by the puzzling pivot to Next Goal Wins, took the gloss off.
All of which makes his run at Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpiece score enormously high on intrigue. The material is strange. Strange is precisely where Waititi thrives.
In Klara and the Sun, Jenna Ortega takes the title role of Klara, an “Artificial Friend” designed to offer companionship and emotional support to isolated teenagers within a near-future society shaped by high-stakes genetic engineering. If only that scanned as absurd sci-fi fantasy instead of a grimly plausible sneak peek at whatever Silicon Valley is cooking up for us.
AI on screen is usually malevolent. Ishiguro frames the technology as a form of existential horror and, simultaneously, as a marvel that asks something like empathy of us.
This is no swashbuckling robo-war epic. It settles into the fine grain of existence, and it ought to hand Waititi a route back to soulful form.
Brad Bird finally gets to make the movie he’s been chasing
Bird got his start co-writing the wonderful Batteries Not Included back in 1987 and has produced plenty of sci-fi in the decades since. The box office has treated it oddly. The Iron Giant is simultaneously an undisputed masterpiece and an outright flop. Tomorrowland got unfairly misread and scarcely recouped what it cost to make.
He does have The Incredibles, at least.
Better yet, Ray Gunn — the passion project he’s nursed for years — is bound for Netflix, so no box office expectations can get in the way of how good it turns out. In the mold of Tomorrowland and The Incredibles, it’s retro-futuristic and animated, welding 1940s noir detective conventions to a future shared between humans and aliens.
Bird has brought back Matthew Robbins, his Batteries Not Included co-writer, whose uncredited script work includes Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. That’s hardly a shortage of quality in one partnership.
Pointing Bird’s storytelling instincts at something this original and this familiar-sounding all at once is a genuine prospect. Out of Comic Con, early write-ups of the opening seven minutes were delightfully glowing.
Ridley Scott hasn’t touched sci-fi since 2017
Alien: Covenant was his most recent, arriving hot on the heels of The Martian, so his genre comeback with The Dog Stars requires little justification.
Drawn from Peter Heller’s acclaimed novel, the story tracks a pilot, his dog and a hard-edged ex-Marine hanging on to survival inside an abandoned hangar after a devastating flu pandemic has decimated human civilization.
Scott at the helm means we can take it as read that the story will speak loudly and the lead performances will connect. This one, though, looks like a shift in register.
Early reactions paint The Dog Stars as a gentler Scott and back up the impression that both narrative and character work impress. Little wonder, with Jacob Elordi, Josh Brolin and Margaret Qualley heading the cast.
Devotees of apocalyptic sci-fi may be more used to blunt mutant or zombie menaces. The dystopia Scott is building, and Heller’s before him, is another animal entirely, carrying the master’s touch. That ought to satisfy anybody.
Godzilla Minus Zero has the hardest act in the genre to follow
Takashi Yamazaki set an intimidating standard in 2023 with Godzilla Minus One, a film both wildly transformative for monster cinema and deeply familiar all at once. It demonstrated that nine-figure Hollywood budgets are unnecessary when you grasp what a Godzilla movie is meant to be. By going back to allegory for trauma in post-war Japan, it earned its place among the century’s most notable movies.
Minus Zero takes over from its Oscar-winning predecessor with a pledge to sustain Toho’s grounded, character-first approach. Yamazaki is back as a triple threat, taking on writing, directing and visual effects supervision, which by itself will have fans hurling money at it.
Match the original’s heights and sci-fi purists get their antidote to empty CGI spectacle and homogenized universe-building. What’s known of the plot is scant: the Shikishima family’s story continues, and another “calamity” strikes in 1949. Central trauma is a lock, and so is further monster action.
Loved the first one? Your tickets are already ring-fenced. Didn’t? Odds are you never watched it.
Denis Villeneuve is walking away from Arrakis
Pedigree alone would let Villeneuve’s third Dune picture, an adaptation of Dune: Messiah, run away with most hype rankings. Warner Bros’ confidence says something too, given they’re putting the threequel — Villeneuve’s farewell to this universe — head-to-head with Avengers: Doomsday.
Should it perform in the region of Part 2, which beat the original’s gross by a shade over $300m, a near-billion-dollar total is within reach.
Quality isn’t decided by money. Still, the hard sci-fi world-building across the first two films is plenty of evidence that the trilogy-closer should be a blast.
Chosen-one messiah narratives typically run a predictable course. Dune: Part Three has advertised its subversion from day one. The same rich lore, the same politics, the same cast, now joined by Robert Pattinson, who at this point amounts to a quality guarantee all by himself. Mute the sound entirely and Villeneuve’s imagery would still be a hell of a treat.
And the biggest one is a comic book movie, which I’m counting anyway
Filing Avengers: Doomsday under pure sci-fi will start arguments. Only one of those two labels is a genuine genre. And this happens to be my list.
Avengers number five is a fascinating proposition, though not for wholly positive reasons. With Spider-Man: Brand New Day having worked as a stand-alone story, Doomsday reverts to the formula that has generated Marvel’s biggest earnings across the Multiverse Saga. Marquee characters, mystery cameos, nostalgia. Hence the delight from so many fans, and precisely why so many cynics are annoyed already.
As with a lot of MCU entries, the story — or whatever can be assembled from surprisingly vague marketing — is high concept sci-fi: the multiverse, variants, techno-magic, universes crashing into one another. It also comes with the massive draw of Robert Downey Jr’s return, every canon wrinkle that entails, and an eye-wateringly good cast.
The Russos are gunning to top Avengers: Endgame, itself due a new version with bridging material timed to land beforehand. Pull that off and there’s no argument left about which film winds up the year’s biggest sci-fi.