I watched every major sci-fi movie in 2025, and these are the 4 best

2025 has come and gone. We’ve had some laughs, made some friends, and seen a lot of movies, including a bunch of excellent sci-fi flicks. From major franchise entries to inventive hidden gems, the year was full of great stuff. With 2026 looking similarly chock-full of sci-fi goodness, now is the perfect time to catch up.

Avatar: Fire and Ash

$800 million and counting can’t be wrong

The Avatar franchise has taken its lumps over the years for having an allegedly small cultural footprint despite its massive success at the box office, but every couple of years a new entry comes out, and every couple of years we line up around the block to see it. The reason why is simple: these movies do spectacle like nothing else on Earth. The moon of Pandora is bright, vast, and full of life, from the Banshees in the sky to the Tulkun beneath the waves. Every shot of the movie is a triumph of special effects, convincing us that these nine-foot-tall blue aliens are living, breathing beings with thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears.

As for the actual story, it seems to bring the Avatar saga almost to an end, what with a couple of important characters seemingly biting the dust (although the movies have faked us out on that score before). The Sully family seems safe, but there’s also room to put them back in danger should the movie prove profitable enough. And if that happens, I’m sure everyone will be right back in the theater.

Mickey 17

Class warfare…IN SPACE!

This movie deserved more love than it got. Mickey 17 is the passion project of director Bong Joon Ho, the genius director behind Parasite and Snowpiercer. Robert Pattinson stars as an unskilled worker in a dystopian future where the divide between the rich and the poor has grown cavernously wide. He takes a job as an “expendable” on a one-way space flight to a distant planet, meaning the scientists on board can use him to carry out highly dangerous tasks and then clone him when he inevitably dies, which he does, over and over again. Things get complicated when they mistakenly make one clone too many, and suddenly there are two Mickeys running around.

Everything in this movie works. Robert Pattinson is fantastic in a dual role; there’s never any question which Mickey you’re looking at. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette are hilarious as the egomaniacal couple in charge of the expedition, and the movie has a tightly written script that effortlessly flows between drama, comedy, satire, and action. In a world full of franchises, it’s refreshing to see something so joyously entertaining and original.

Companion

2025’s best AI monster movie

Companion is hardly the first film about a humanoid robot who turns on their human companions, but at a time when AI is getting better and better at mimicking human behavior, movies like this become creepy in a whole new way. How long will it really be before we can rent out our own robot companions to do our chores, take care of our kids, or even be our romantic partners?

In the world of Companion, that time is already here. Sophie Thatcher plays Iris, the robotic girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid, who subverts his usual guy-next-door charm by playing a greedy sleazeball). Josh has altered her programming a bit to help him pull off a get-rich-quick scheme during a weekend visit to his wealthy friend’s lake house. Of course, things get out of control, and I’ve left it to you to discover the rest.

Companion is produced by Zach Cregger, who directed the superb horror film Weapons this year. Companion recalls that movie in the way it smartly mixes scares with laughs, all while making you think about where this kind of technology could be headed.

Predator: Badlands

Suck it, Alien

Back to franchises, Predador: Badlands may be the cinematic triumph of the year. Think about it: the Predator franchise is nearly 40 years old, and somehow it’s still putting out original, exciting entries that don’t retread any old ground. The gimmick in Badlands is that it’s the first time that a Predator has actually been the main character in a Predator movie. We follow Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi ), a young Predator who’s trying to prove himself to his people by hunting the biggest and toughest game in the galaxy. By getting to know him, writer-director Dan Trachtenberg flips the central premise of the series on its head without ever straying so far that it doesn’t feel like part of the franchise, all while showing us a great time at the movies.

Elle Fanning is also fun as Thia, a damaged synthetic humanoid who’s mostly there so Dek has someone to talk to; I don’t think any human beings get a line in this movie. The whole thing is so bold and successful that I can’t help but walk away impressed and excited to see what Trachtenberg does with the franchise next. In fact, if you finish Badlands and want more, he also put out an animated Predator movie on Hulu in 2025 called Predator: Killer of Killers, which is also terrific.

7 brilliant sci-fi movies under 90 minutes you can finish tonight

Whether you want something fun and accessible or dense and difficult, there’s a short sci-fi movie out there with your name on it.

With apologies to the rest

There are some other big-name movies I’m leaving off this list, but not necessarily because they’re bad. Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps may technically qualify as sci-fi, but superhero movies are really more of their own genre. Frankenstein is a foundation sci-fi story, but it was written so long ago that the new movie from Guillermo del Toro, solid though it is, plays more like historical fiction. Bugonia was fun, but I don’t think it could be called a “major” sci-fi movie from 2025. Tron: Ares was sci-fi…but that one actually was also bad.

Even with those exceptions, 2025 offered us plenty to watch and rewatch. Enjoy.