Best Sci-Fi Movies of the 2020s, Ranked: Top 10 So Far — An Animated Robot Beats Dune and Godzilla Before Dune: Part Three

With Dune: Part Three opening December 18, a data-ranked look at the ten best-reviewed science fiction films since 2020: Tomatometer and Metascore averaged, official trailers included.

Dune: Part Three opens in theaters on December 18, 2026, with a three-week IMAX exclusivity window over Avengers: Doomsday, so the biggest science fiction event of the year is two months away. It is a good moment to ask a simple question: which science fiction films of this decade have the critics actually loved? This guide ranks the ten best-reviewed ones so far, using Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic rather than anyone's favourites, and it includes the two Dune films that lead into December.

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The Wild Robot details →YouTube ↗

How this list works: each film's FilmRated score is the average of its Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and its Metacritic Metascore, both checked on October 19, 2026, with halves rounded up. Ties are broken by the higher Metascore. The pool is wide-release science fiction features from 2020 to October 2026, live-action or animated. Streaming-only releases and superhero films are left out, since each is a category of its own. We scored 14 films and these are the ten that came out on top. The four that missed the cut were Mickey 17 (75), Avatar: The Way of Water (72), Alien: Romulus (72) and Tenet (70). The scores come from the aggregators' own pages, and they move a little over time.

10. Dune (2021). FilmRated score 79 (Rotten Tomatoes 83%, Metacritic 74). Denis Villeneuve's first Dune is listed on screen as Dune: Part One, because it covers only the first half of Frank Herbert's 1965 novel. Villeneuve wrote the script with Jon Spaihts and Eric Roth, and Timothee Chalamet plays Paul Atreides, with Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Javier Bardem and Jason Momoa around him. It was shot from March to July 2019 in Hungary, Jordan, Norway and the United Arab Emirates, and Hans Zimmer wrote the score.

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Godzilla Minus One details →YouTube ↗

The pandemic pushed its release back from late 2020. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 3, 2021, and opened in US theaters and on HBO Max on October 22. It cost $165 million and grossed $411 million, and it won six Academy Awards from ten nominations. It ranks last of the ten on score, and its Metascore of 74 is the second lowest here. It is the setup for Dune: Part Two, which ranks six places higher.

9. Nope. FilmRated score 80 (Rotten Tomatoes 83%, Metacritic 77). Jordan Peele's third film is a science fiction neo-Western about two horse-wrangling siblings in Agua Dulce, California, played by Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer, who try to capture proof of a UFO that is taking their animals. Steven Yeun, Brandon Perea, Michael Wincott and Keith David are in the cast. Universal released it on July 22, 2022, with a budget of $68 million after tax incentives, and it grossed about $172 million worldwide.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once details →YouTube ↗

Hoyte van Hoytema shot it on Kodak film, including 65mm IMAX, which Wikipedia describes as a first for a horror film. The American Film Institute named it one of the top ten films of 2022, it won the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film, and Palmer won Best Supporting Actress from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Toronto Film Critics Association.

8. Companion. FilmRated score 82 (Rotten Tomatoes 93%, Metacritic 70). Drew Hancock wrote and directed this low-budget thriller, his first feature, about a weekend at a lakeside house that goes wrong for Iris (Sophie Thatcher), the girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid). Lukas Gage, Megan Suri, Harvey Guillen and Rupert Friend complete the cast, and Zach Cregger is among the producers. Warner Bros. released it on January 31, 2025. It cost $10 million and grossed about $37 million worldwide, $20.9 million of it in the US and Canada.

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Dune: Part Two details →YouTube ↗

Rotten Tomatoes' consensus calls it a fiendishly clever contraption that does not rely on its twists. The Metascore of 70 shows that the critics were warm rather than wild, and it is the lowest Metascore in the ten. Thatcher won Best Actress in a Science Fiction/Fantasy Movie at the Critics' Choice Super Awards, and Hancock won the Directors to Watch award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. We say no more about the plot, because it is better to know as little as possible.

7. The Substance. FilmRated score 84 (Rotten Tomatoes 89%, Metacritic 78). Coralie Fargeat's body-horror film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a fading actress fired from her aerobics TV show at 50, who uses a black-market drug to create a younger version of herself, Sue (Margaret Qualley). The two must switch bodies every week, and the rules, naturally, are broken. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2024, where it won Best Screenplay, and opened in the US and UK on September 20, 2024.

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Project Hail Mary details →YouTube ↗

Universal was first lined up to distribute it, but Mubi bought the rights after a dispute over final cut. It cost $18 million, grossed $77 million to $82 million and became Mubi's highest-grossing film. The production used roughly 21,000 liters of theatrical blood. Moore won the Golden Globe, the Critics' Choice Award and the SAG Award, and the film earned five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and won one, for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.

6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. FilmRated score 85 (Rotten Tomatoes 90%, Metacritic 79). George Miller's prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road follows the warrior from her abduction as a child (Alyla Browne) to her adult life (Anya Taylor-Joy), with Chris Hemsworth as the warlord Dementus and Tom Burke as Praetorian Jack. Miller wrote it with Nico Lathouris. It premiered at Cannes on May 15, 2024 and opened in the US on May 24. Principal photography began in June 2022 in New South Wales, and it runs 148 minutes.

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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga details →YouTube ↗

The critics were highly positive, but audiences stayed away. Its reported budget was $168 million and the film grossed $174.4 million worldwide, which Wikipedia calls a failure. It is the clearest example on this list of a film that critics rated highly and the box office ignored.

5. Project Hail Mary. FilmRated score 86 (Rotten Tomatoes 95%, Metacritic 77). The newest film on the list is also the biggest earner. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed this adaptation of Andy Weir's 2021 novel, from a script by Drew Goddard. Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft, and Sandra Huller plays Eva Stratt. Amazon MGM Studios opened it in the US on March 20, 2026, after a London premiere on March 9. Its $80.6 million opening was the biggest in the studio's history, and it had grossed about $685.3 million worldwide by September 11.

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The Substance details →YouTube ↗

The film's alien, Rocky, is a puppet operated by a team of five puppeteers led by James Ortiz, who also voices him, with Framestore adding animation to roughly half of his shots, according to Miller. It was shot from June to October 2024, mostly in the UK, on Arri Alexa 65 cameras for IMAX. Audiences gave it an A CinemaScore. It won Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Movie at the Critics' Choice Super Awards, and Gosling won the acting prize there. It ties with the next film on 86 and loses only on Metascore, 77 against 79.

4. Dune: Part Two. FilmRated score 86 (Rotten Tomatoes 92%, Metacritic 79). Villeneuve's second Dune picks up where the first stopped, with Paul Atreides allying with the Fremen to overthrow House Harkonnen. Chalamet and Zendaya lead, Austin Butler plays Feyd-Rautha, and Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Rebecca Ferguson and Josh Brolin are in the cast. Filming ran from July to December 2022 in Hungary, Italy, Jordan, Namibia and the UAE, and some Giedi Prime scenes were shot with infrared filters to give them a desaturated, black-and-white look.

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Companion details →YouTube ↗

It opened on March 1, 2024, cost a reported $190 million and grossed about $715 million worldwide, the seventh-highest total of 2024. It earned five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and won two, for Best Sound and Best Visual Effects. Villeneuve has called it an epic war movie built on the relationship between Paul and Chani. Next is Dune: Part Three, with Chalamet, Zendaya, Pugh, Momoa, Pattinson and Anya Taylor-Joy, which Warner Bros. will release on December 18. It is based on Dune Messiah, and Villeneuve wrote it with Brian K. Vaughan.

3. Everything Everywhere All at Once. FilmRated score 87 (Rotten Tomatoes 93%, Metacritic 81). Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's multiverse comedy-drama stars Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, a laundromat owner facing an IRS audit who must connect with alternate versions of herself to stop a threat to all of reality. Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis co-star. A24 premiered it at South by Southwest on March 11, 2022 and released it on March 25, going wide on April 8.

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Nope details →YouTube ↗

It cost $14 million to $25 million and grossed about $143.4 million, which made it A24's highest-grossing film ever by June 9, 2022 and the first A24 film to pass $100 million worldwide. At the 95th Academy Awards it received 11 nominations and won seven, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing, and Yeoh, Quan and Curtis took home three of the acting awards. It is the film on this list that did the most with the least money.

2. Godzilla Minus One. FilmRated score 90 (Rotten Tomatoes 99%, Metacritic 81). Takashi Yamazaki wrote, directed and supervised the visual effects for this postwar story. Ryunosuke Kamiki plays a former kamikaze pilot with PTSD who must face Godzilla in a Japan with almost nothing left. Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando and Kuranosuke Sasaki co-star. It opened in Japan on November 3, 2023, on the franchise's 70th anniversary, and Toho International released it in North America on December 1.

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Dune (Dune: Part One) details →YouTube ↗

The budget is reported as roughly $10 million to $15 million, never confirmed, and it grossed about $116 million worldwide, the most of any Japanese Godzilla film. Shirogumi made the 610 visual effects shots. It won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, the first for a non-English-language film in that category. Rotten Tomatoes lists it at 99% from 213 reviews, the highest Tomatometer on the list. A follow-up, Godzilla Minus Zero, is scheduled for November 2026.

1. The Wild Robot. FilmRated score 91 (Rotten Tomatoes 97%, Metacritic 85). The best-reviewed film in our pool is an animated movie about a service robot. Chris Sanders wrote and directed this DreamWorks Animation film from Peter Brown's 2016 novel. Lupita Nyong'o voices Roz, a robot stranded on an island, with Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill and Catherine O'Hara. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2024 and opened in the US on September 27.

It cost $78 million and grossed about $334 million. Sanders described its painterly look as a Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest, and Kris Bowers composed the score, his first for a fully animated feature. It won nine Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature, as well as the Critics' Choice and Producers Guild awards for the category, and it received three Oscar nominations, for Best Animated Feature, Best Original Score and Best Sound. A sequel based on The Wild Robot Escapes is in development, with Troy Quane named as director in March 2026.

Put the ten side by side and a few patterns show up. The average Tomatometer is 91.4%, the average Metascore is 76.1 and the average FilmRated score is 85. Four of the ten were released in 2024, and no 2020 film makes the list: the oldest is Dune from October 2021. Four of the ten were released by Warner Bros. (both Dune films, Furiosa and Companion), and six cost under $80 million: Godzilla Minus One, Companion, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Substance, Nope and The Wild Robot.

Which should you watch first? If you have not seen the Dune films and want to be ready for December 18, watch Dune and Dune: Part Two back to back, which takes about five and a third hours. If you want something to watch with the whole family, The Wild Robot is the one. If you want a recent crowd-pleaser, Project Hail Mary has grossed about $685 million worldwide. And if you only have a short evening, Companion runs 97 minutes and is best watched knowing nothing. The official trailers are embedded on each film's page.