The 15 Best Sci-Fi Movies & TV Of The Year, Ranked

This year’s best science fiction was more earthbound than cosmic. There were coming-of-age sagas, miserable women on missions to save the Earth, Patton Oswalt playing a Vulcan, and Lee Pace looking more and more like Jesus. They also reflected many of our recent anxieties back at us: the dangers of A.I. and surveillance, the rise of authoritarianism, and the need for hope and resistance in the face of both.

By deadline, a couple of this year’s biggest sci-fi titles haven’t yet been released, like the final season of Stranger Things and Avatar: Fire and Ash. (We’ll see you soon, Payakan.) But that only reinforces how much there was to discover in 2025.

Here are Inverse’s top 15 sci-fi movies and TV shows of the year.

15. Alien: Earth

Alien: Earth wasn’t as much of a you-betcha success as Noah Hawley’s equally ambitious Fargo, but there’s still a lot to love. There’s a new wave of eldritch creepy crawlies to terrorize the tech CEO overlords and newly minted child cyborgs. But the show is at its best when Timothy Olyphant’s silver-foxed Android faces off against Babou Ceesay’s relentless cyborg enforcer.

14. Mickey 17

After the pristine perfection of the Oscar winning Parasite, of course Bong Joon Ho followed it up with a zany maximalist space opera with two Robert Pattinsons facing off Trumpian space overlords who love sauce. The best and worst thing about Mickey 17 is it feels like he took every idea through his career and pushed them to deliriously over the top extremes. It’s a lot, maybe too much, but it’s still a worthy watch.

13. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

The worlds may not be quite as strange or the stories as deep as earlier seasons, but the best Star Trek show in ages still prospers even if it won’t live long. There are planets swarming with zombies and Klingons (and some zombie-Klingons), an origin story for a glitchy holodeck, and archeological dives into ancient alien prisons. Sure, the major focus on love quadrangles may drag, but the cast, led by Anson Mount, is never less than charming.

12. Predator: Killer of Killers & Predator: Badlands

Dan Trachtenberg’s four Predator stories, which vary from samurai showdowns to far-flung death planets, are pretty close to what we say we want from franchise storytelling: nostalgia-free ideas that expand, rather than shrink, what a series has been known to be. There are varying preferences on which of these are better than others, but his mind for likable leads and inventive bloodletting helps propel Predator forward. I like when Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) uses grenades made from bugs.

11. Superman

James Gunn’s start of the DCU is overstuffed, thematically messy and repeats one too many beats reminiscent of his earlier work, but when Clark Kent tells Lois Lane why he has to rescue a (not very good) dog, man, that’s Superman. It may sometimes struggle under everything it tries to achieve, but David Corenswet’s performance, as mighty as a Kryptonian in a yellow sun, gives it flight.

10. Foundation Season 3

It’s not just for dearth of competition that Foundation reigns among the best ongoing space operas today, with a budget that supports a level of scale and beauty seldom seen on television or film. The third season pushed its trio of “Empire” clones, headed by Lee Pace, to daring extremes, while Laura Birn gave one of the best performances of the year as an ancient cyborg imprisoned to rule.

9. Severance Season 2

Whether you jeered or cheered at Mark S. (Adam Scott) and Helly R.’s (Britt Lower) triumphant run to nowhere, it’s inarguable that the closing moments of Severance Season 2 was the most hotly debated topic of TV this year. It gave rise to a discussion on personal agency and corporate dehumanization — the exact kind of conversation that great sci-fi can start. And though Season 2 struggled with its widening scope and mythology, it still ended on an emotional peak higher than the world’s tallest waterfall.

8. Bugonia

Is she or isn’t she? It’s the central question of Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s fourth collaboration together, which turns the kidnapping of a CEO (Stone) by a UFO conspiracy theorist (Jesse Plemmons) into another 2025 rumination on the collapsing modes of communication across class and political lines, as her corporate-speak and his tin-foiled jargon are in perpetual disconnect.

7. Happyend

In a near-future that feels more like today by the minute, a surveillance system has been installed at a Tokyo high school after a group of lovable but disaffected teens may or may not have turned the principal’s car upright like a domino. It’s a dystopian premise demonstrating how the slow creep of fascism disrupts our lives, which is why its ambiguous ending, which puts hope in the next generation to resist, is all the more moving.

6. Arco

Pulling from a wealth of sci-fi influences like E.T. and Interstellar, a boy with a time-traveling technicolor dreamcoat visits a past ravaged by climate change and makes friends with a girl who’s been wishing for a friend. It’s a tale of young love, innocence and renewal, with some of the most thoughtful world building in years. Like a shimmering rainbow after a tempest, the unapologetic optimism of Arco is infectious.

5. The Shrouds

David Cronenberg’s achingly personal tech thriller considers the voids left by death and how our digital age abusively tries to fill them; there are graveyards that turn a loved one’s remains into digital simulacra, A.I. helpers that manipulate their users, and labyrinths of conspiracy that lead to limbo. Morbidly funny and deeply moving, it’s one of Cronenberg’s best in years.

4. Resurrection

A mesmerizing meditation on time, loss, and cinema, Bi Gan’s follow-up to Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a visually stunning experimental dreamwork. Told from an ambiguous future where we’re no longer permitted to dream, these six stories, each shape-shifting genre and style, reflect, mourn, and reclaim the history of film itself.

3. 28 Years Later

What could’ve felt like another cynically resurrected franchise turned out to be one of the most daring and formally exciting studio movies in years. In the first part of a planned trilogy, we follow young Spike’s (Alfie Williams) ultraviolent coming of age amidst zombie-infected England, only for Danny Boyle and Alex Garland to then subvert the genre they helped revitalize by making a shockingly moving meditation on accepting the inevitability of death.

2. Pluribus

Led by a brilliant Rhea Seahorn who plays a protagonist that dares to be unlikable, this is speculative sci-fi at its most probing and witty. Even now I’m reluctant to give away its original premise, but each episode serves up a delightful scenario that questions nothing less than what it means to be human. There’s been half a dozen “definitive interpretations” on what it all means since it’s begun to air — grief, agency, A.I., consciousness, depression, et cetera — and the series is so rich that they’re all true. Vince Gilligan’s first series to exit the world of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul is a triumph.

1. Andor

What seemed like a foolhardy spinoff of a B character in Rogue One used all the pop and crackle of Lucas’ galaxy to craft an exegesis on fascism and the nuances (and necessity) of resistance. Yet, out of that darkness, the second and final season ended in the way Star Wars always should: on hope. Possibly the most rousing and incisive Star Wars has ever been, it’s still hard to believe Andor actually exists.