Great Sci-Fi Movies That Shouldn’t Have Skipped Theaters

The film industry around the world is currently at a crossroads: How can audience interest in the theatrical experience possibly be rebuilt, when everyone’s become so accustomed to the immeasurable convenience of streaming? A good first step, of course, would be to let films actually play in theaters — and, even more than that, to let films play in theaters without having their box office runs curtailed by shorter release windows and premature streaming availability.

Is there any hope of Hollywood execs internalizing that notion before it’s too late? Hard to tell at this point. But if they do, it will be to the benefit of both filmmakers and viewers, as attested by the numerous films in recent years that deeply deserved big-screen time yet never got it — or got so little of it that 99% of viewers saw them on streaming anyway. Easy and accessible as watching movies on streaming can be, nothing beats a good theatrical experience on the level of sheer immersion and enchantment. And the number of movies in the streaming era that never got that platform is appalling.

This issue hits sci-fi, a genre largely built on the kind of dense world-building and attention to detail that a super-sized screen can reward, particularly hard. What if mainstream audiences have lost the next “Matrix” to the indecipherable depths of the streaming algorithm? To help fight back against that spooky possibility, here’s a list of great sci-fi films that got little to no time to shine in theaters.

South Korean master Bong Joon-ho was already well-acquainted with the sci-fi genre in 2017. After all, his international breakthrough had come with the 2006 monster flick “The Host.” He was already acquainted with the Hollywood system as well, having made “Snowpiercer” under it a few years earlier — a project for which he struggled to get final cut. But even so, “Okja” was a first for Bong in one very crucial sense: It was his first film to be funded and distributed by a streaming service.

Netflix took “Okja” to the Cannes Film Festival in May 2017 before releasing it to the general public on June 28; as it happens, that release wasn’t accompanied by a theatrical bow outside of South Korea — and even there, the film’s number of screens was limited by the simultaneous day-and-date Netflix release that prompted some theater chains to boycott it.

It’s a shame, because “Okja” — a crowd-pleasing sci-fi adventure about a genetically engineered super pig marked for slaughter by a megacorporation, and the teenager (Ahn Seo-hyun) who grew up with Okja and is determined to save her — is one of Bong’s very best. It’s a searing critique of the meat industry that doubles as a hilarious and exuberant globe-trotting sociopolitical satire, with Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, Steven Yeun and more turning in enormously entertaining performances. Most of all, however, it’s the story of a girl and her pig, as irresistible and tear-jerking as the very best human-animal friendship flicks.

Time loop movies have been around for decades and were arguably the defining trend of 2020, but very few have approached the premise with as much freshness and self-awareness as “Palm Springs,” which considers the time loop with all the clarity and imagination it deserves as a romantic metaphor. Scripted by Andy Siara and directed by Max Barbakow — both in their feature debuts, excluding Barbakow’s 2013 Yale thesis film “Mommy, I’m a Bastard!” — “Palm Springs” was released directly to Hulu in July 2020. And, while it did get the chance to screen in a handful of drive-in theaters simultaneously with its Hulu release, it very much deserved the proper if limited theatrical rollout that other acclaimed films got during the pandemic.

Andy Samberg stars as Nyles, a man stuck in a time loop that begins on the morning of a wedding where his girlfriend (Meredith Hagner) is acting as bridesmaid, and goes on until he falls asleep or dies. One day, he accidentally pulls the bride’s sister Sarah (Cristin Milioti) into the loop, and the two get stuck together reliving the same unchanging routine over and over again — Sarah waffling between despair and hedonistic abandon, and Nyles already long resigned to his fate. It’s a rock-solid romcom with all hallmarks of success in the genre, including the ebullient chemistry between Milioti and Samberg; even more importantly, it’s a disarmingly sensitive and profound treatise on the way love can both trap us in and free us from complacency.

Like “Palm Springs,” “The Vast of Night” only had a two-week window in drive-in theaters before getting ushered to its distributor’s streaming platform. Although watching the Andrew Patterson film on Amazon Prime Video was more than enough for anyone to peg it as one of the strongest debut films of 2020, it’s still hard not to envy the Slamdance audiences who got to see it in a theatrical setting in January 2019.

After all, to a much greater degree than the majority of studio sci-fi films, this bonafide indie (budgeted at $700,000, funded by the director himself, and starring no name actors) is absolutely made for the silent, fully absorbed awe of the movie theater, where the precision of its sound design and the unhurried, deliberate pacing of its story would have had all the room they needed to shine fully. 

Set in a fictional New Mexico small town in the 1950s, “The Vast of Night” tells the story of two high school friends, disc jockey Everett (Jake Horowitz) and switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick), who happen upon a bizarre radio frequency, and set out to investigate its potentially alien origins. Taking place over the course of a single night, the film rekindles a long-lost sense of wonder and terror at the idea of extraterrestrial life, evoking Cold War-era classics with minimalist staging and plotting and the occasional jaw-dropping long take. It’s sci-fi to tune out the world and get lost in.

“Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood” was the third rotoscoped animated feature from Richard Linklater, and the third high-profile American film about the Apollo 11 mission and the first moon landing in just under five years. It was also Linklater’s first film to be distributed by Netflix — a collaboration that would continue with this year’s “Hit Man.” Much like “Hit Man,” “Apollo 10 ½” deserved better than just a few days of limited theatrical play followed by box office-killing Netflix availability.

The 2022 sci-fi animated film got an even worse shake than “Hit Man,” actually, with a mere one-week theatrical window in select theaters against “Hit Man'”s two weeks and international theater time. That release model may help explain why “Apollo 10 ½” slipped by relatively unnoticed in the 2022 film year, ultimately missing out on an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature — a rare occurrence for American auteur films in the category. That should definitely not have been the case for a movie that outdoes Linklater’s previous forays into rotoscoped sci-fi in animation quality and sheer visual splendor, while matching them in philosophical and emotional richness.

With its story of a boy (Milo Coy) from the Houston suburbs who witnesses firsthand the impact of Apollo 11 on the city while grappling with a top-secret NASA mission of his own, “Apollo 10 ½” serves as yet another reminder that animation is not a genre, but a medium with inexhaustible potential.

It’s hard to get too pressed about the fact that “Nimona” wasn’t given much of a theatrical bow, when we could just as well be living in a timeline where the movie doesn’t exist at all. Originally a Blue Sky Studios production, “Nimona” had a long, hard road to the screen, which included getting scrapped altogether when Blue Sky got closed down in 2021 — with many speculating that Disney’s disinterest in carrying the project through to completion might have something to do with its pioneering LGBTQ+ representation. Ultimately, though, Annapurna and Netflix rescued the project, which got exclusive theatrical screenings on June 24 before debuting on Netflix on June 30, 2023.

As relieved as the animation community was for “Nimona,” though, it’s still a shame that precious few viewers worldwide ever got the chance to witness the movie’s gorgeous DNEG-supplied animation and heartrending sci-fantasy tale on the big screen. Adapted from the eponymous graphic novel by ND Stevenson, the movie pulls viewers into a dazzling medieval-inspired retrofuturist world, where knight Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) falls into disgrace after being framed for the murder of Queen Valerin (Lorraine Toussaint), and must form an improbable bond with Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz), a shapeshifter who’s taken the form of a spunky teenage girl, in order to prove his innocence. And yeah, Ballister has a boyfriend (Eugene Lee Yang). Much more than a win for casual LGBTQ+ representation, “Nimona” is a brilliant film that deserves the widest possible audience.

French director Alexandre Aja has been at the forefront of thrill-heavy pop cinema in the 21st century, with a filmography that has ranged from the New French Extremity ultraviolence of “High Tension,” to the meat-and-potatoes spooky efficiency of “Mirrors,” to the schlocky absurdity of “Piranha 3D.” In 2019, Aja showed that he had a knack for the survival thriller subgenre with “Crawl,” a proverbial Florida-set tale of woman versus killer alligator. In 2021, he showed it once again with “Oxygen.”

Unlike “Crawl,” “Oxygen” skipped theaters and was released directly to Netflix, but it’s easy to imagine its lean, tense-filled storytelling making waves even across the language barrier. Marking Aja’s return to French-language cinema for the first time since “High Tension,” “Oxygen” stars Mélanie Laurent as a woman who wakes up in a medical cryogenic chamber with no memory of who she is or how she got there, and then learns that she’s trapped and running out of — you guessed it — oxygen.

Starting from that minimal setup, Aja goes hard on the claustrophobia and builds a gripping, twist-filled story from the woman’s interactions with the chamber’s AI interface M.I.L.O. (voiced by Mathieu Amalric) and her gradual discoveries about her past. And, although the lack of movement and the camera’s constant proximity pose a daunting challenge to Laurent, she meets it every step of the way, offering up one of those flawless thriller performances that never seem to get the acclaim they deserve.

It may have become one of the most-watched streaming movies of 2020 and an enormous cultural sensation in online fandom spaces, but Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Old Guard” deserved more than just TV screens. Unmistakably smarter, sturdier, and more refined than most big-budget Netflix actioners with Hollywood name stars, it’s the kind of movie that could have dominated a pre-summer April or a busy October in another era of moviegoing, a bare-knuckles action flick with a lot more depth and staying power than it looks.

It’s not just an action film, mind you; “The Old Guard” is also sci-fi, not to mention a superhero flick of a very different flavor. Adapted from the eponymous graphic novel series by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández, it tells of a band of warriors whose regenerative powers render them basically immortal and have allowed them to spend centuries working as pragmatic but altruistic mercenaries. Leading the pack is Andromache of Scythia a.k.a. Andy (Charlize Theron), who must get over her deep-ingrained cynicism and boredom with the world in order to bring a newly-minted immortal, U.S. Marine Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne), into the fold.

In addition to boasting an enormously charismatic cast of heroes and tackling superhero mechanics thoughtfully and creatively, with set pieces that take full advantage of the characters’ powers, “The Old Guard” is the rare entry in the genre that takes the time to grapple seriously with what it means to be a positive force on the world.

Another example of a film that only played a small handful of theaters for a very brief amount of time in North America before making its way to the home screens where people actually watched it is “They Cloned Tyrone.” The Juel Taylor film had a basically nonexistent one-week theatrical window in limited release before hitting Netflix, marking it as yet another film that the streamer put into theaters for presumable awards-qualifying purposes without really intending to make much off of ticket sales.

Once again, it’s a movie that really deserved the boost of a theatrical setting. Directed by Taylor with astonishing verve and resourcefulness for a feature first-timer, “They Cloned Tyrone” is a sci-fi comedy that pulls shrewdly from inspirations as varied as the Coen brothers, Boots Riley, and ’70s Blaxploitation, yet unifies its cinematic references into a completely original whole.

The fun begins with the cast, which features John Boyega, Teyonah Parris, and Jamie Foxx all in top form, giving some of their most playful and charismatic performances yet. In the plot, a drug dealer named Fontaine (John Boyega) is killed by a rival and wakes up alive the next day — leading him and his friends to uncover a massive government-backed conspiracy involving cloning, surveillance, and a slew of other surprises. Like a lot of the best sci-fi, the film excels as political satire and makes cogent points about the horrors of various real-life institutions. Most importantly, though, it’s just really, really funny.

Premiered only in a handful of theaters in New York and Los Angeles three days prior to its streaming release, “No One Will Save You” never really got a chance to put crowds under the spell of its silence-based ethos like “A Quiet Place” did. But still, even the viewers who experience it by hitting play on Hulu are likely to come away impressed.

The premise, in itself, is a classic one: Seamstress Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) finds her home and then her town to have been invaded by humanoid aliens, and must huddle up in her isolated forest house and concentrate efforts on surviving whatever threat the aliens might pose. The strength of the film is not in the originality of the central narrative conceit but in the specifics, and in the unique way the story is told.

For starters, Brynn is a loner, completely disconnected from her hostile and judgmental community, and still mourning her recent losses of both her mother and her best friend. Secondly, “No One Will Save You” is one of a handful of recent mainstream Hollywood films to feature little to no spoken dialogue. Brynn doesn’t need to talk, after all; she just needs to get things done. In that sense, the sophomore film from Brian Duffield (the “Spontaneous” director who we interviewed for this alien film) feels sometimes like a sci-fi horror answer to “All Is Lost” — and pretty much as gripping as that sounds.

You’d think the first animated feature ever to be directed by animation and special effects legend Phil Tippett would be granted the pomp and circumstance of an exclusive theatrical release, but here we are. Acquired by Shudder at the 2021 Locarno Film Festival, “Mad God” was ultimately slated for a streaming release near-concurrently with a limited theatrical bow. The movie opened in U.S. theaters on June 10, 2022 and then hit AMC+ six days later; at the box office, it ultimately grossed just over $300,000 with a peak of 37 screens. It’s safe to say that most animation fans never got the chance to see Tippett’s magnum opus on the big screen.

What a shame. To be clear, “Mad God” is still an animation masterpiece even seen on a tablet, but a wider theatrical release with a reasonable exclusivity window could have allowed audiences to better appreciate the overwhelming richness of the film’s stop-motion work. It’s difficult to even summarize the plot, which revels in strangeness and mystery, but it goes something like this: A figure known as the Assassin descends further and further into a dark, mechanical underworld full of bizarre creatures and unspeakable horrors, all in the name of a mission that isn’t quite clear to us as viewers. As he carries out his exploration, we are essentially given a glimpse into the creative mind of Phil Tippett himself, and get to bask in his horrifying yet thoroughly mesmerizing creation. You haven’t seen another movie quite like this.

South Korean filmmaker Yeon Sang-ho did the impossible in 2016, when his relentless action horror joint “Train to Busan” somehow breathed wholly new life into the zombie subgenre and became a runaway box office phenomenon. That same year, in another project, he kept the thematic focus while branching out into a different medium: “Seoul Station” serves as a prequel to “Train to Busan” chronicling how the zombie outbreak in South Korea began, and also stands as a rare instance of an honest-to-goodness animated horror film.

Perhaps the dearth of market precedent for that particular cross between genre and medium might explain why, even as a prequel to one of the year’s biggest non-English-language hits, “Seoul Station” skipped theaters in the U.S. and went straight to home video and streaming months after its South Korean release. We’ll never know if the film would have been as successful in the U.S. specialty circuit as “Train to Busan” had it been allowed to play it, but what we do know is that it’s an excellent film in its own right.

Maintaining the non-stop ground-level urgency that made “Busan” so vital, yet substituting its more organized train-bound structure for uncontained urban mayhem as various characters find themselves fighting for their lives on the streets of Seoul, it’s another showcase of Yeon’s ability to weave humanity and pathos into even the most complicated sci-fi scenarios by keeping the focus on the characters — now given extra expressiveness by the lushly detailed 2D animation.