Not every science fiction movie goes down the rabbit hole like The Matrix did to establish a series and not every movie can be Star Wars or Star Trek and spawn a global multi-media empire. Sometimes a franchise is a plan, but those films flop at the box office and those would-be properties go back to the drawing board.
Not all movies can launch a grand sweeping multi-film saga and most aren’t meant to. However, some of the movies on this list sure could have, and some we’d just like to see a lot more of. Here are our top 10 sci-fi movies that never got sequels.
10 The Fifth Element
A weapon of mass destruction is hurtling through the cosmos. The only way of stopping it was hidden on Earth a millennia ago. It turns out that the only way is actually Leeloo, the beautiful woman, just created and crashed through Bruce Willis’ taxi.
Luc Besson’s follow-up to Leon, The Fifth Element was heralded as the next Star Wars by some credits, which wasn’t far off the mark. There was plenty in this movie that had never been seen before (at the time). But it doesn’t seem that anyone was interested in making a sequel.
9 The Martian
Mark Watney and his fellow astronauts were researching Mars when catastrophe struck. Commander Melissa Lewis made the tough call to save most of her team, leaving Watney presumed dead on the Red Planet after a violent storm.
Left alive and stranded, Watney has to figure out a way to survive on Mars and eventually get word to NASA that he’s still alive, unless the Commander’s horrid disco music kills him first.
8 Interstellar
As the planet grows closer and closer to a massive extinction event (namely, us), it’s up to all that’s left of NASA to boldly go where no one has gone before... or at least no one has come back from.
Christopher Nolan’s ode to Kubrick, Interstellar takes its cue tonally from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the director masterfully crafts something totally new.
7 Ready Player One
Steven Spielberg took one of the most meta-eighties books of all time and crafted an adaptation that is the most meta-Spielberg movie of all time.
Ready Player One tells the story of Parzival, one of the billions of people playing and living in the virtual world, OASIS. When the game’s creator dies; a mad dash to find his Easter Egg begins. Parzival and his friends want to find the Egg and save the game for everyone, while an evil corporation, IOI and its boss, Nolan Sorrento, try to beat the game so Sorrento can control the game for his own purposes.
6 Avatar
Until, (if and when) James Cameron actually releases sequels to his smash-hit, Avatar, the movie belongs on this list.
Filling in for his deceased twin brother, Sully takes part in the Avatar program, where he inhabits the body of a Na’vi tribesmen, the natives of Pandora. It isn’t long before Sully is accepted into the their tribe and has to choose between helping the marines sent to mine Pandora for Unobtainium or help the Na’vi preserve their way of life.
The film was breathtaking to behold eleven years ago and was only recently dethroned as the highest-grossing movie ever made.
5 THX-1138
Before he focused solely on Star Wars, George Lucas had adapted his student film into a major feature.
THX-1138 was a vast dystopian movie where all feelings and emotions aren’t just quelled, but forbidden and kept in check with drugs. Fans can and will say whatever they want about the man, but Lucas has always been good at world-building (see American Graffiti and Willow) and this movie is no different. Once THX gets out, what happened next would have made for a crazy sequel.
4 Galaxy Quest
What would happen if a bunch of aliens who thought Star Trek was real came to our planet and asked William Shatner to help save them? The premise is simple and rife for all kinds of comedy.
It’s also exactly what Galaxy Quest is about. Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Alan Rickman are just three of the cast members of the cult sci-fi show, Galaxy Quest. Along with the rest of their castmates, they now have to save the galaxy for real, even though they’re just actors.
3 Spaceballs
You can almost always tell the age of a Mel Brooks fan based on which Mel Brooks film is their favorite. If you’re born in the early eighties, that would mean Spaceballs takes the cake.
A complete spoof on Star Wars (as if you didn’t know), the movie was ready for a sequel, even during the movie itself (“The Search For More Money”)! But if Mel has one more big movie in him, there’s six more Star Wars movies and a slew of other science fiction hits that could use his patented skewering.
2 Jumper
Speaking of Star Wars, it’s much-maligned and criticized star Hayden Christensen is actually a pretty decent actor. In Jumper, he plays David, a kid who learns he has the ability to teleport, or “jump.” He’s not the only one, and his kind are hunted down by Paladins.
This is the kind of movie that a list like this was made for, especially considering there is a whole series of books to pull material from. While the movie didn’t get any sequels. One of the books, Impulse, has been adapted into a YouTube Premium series.
1 Inception
Christopher Nolan doesn’t do anything conventionally. His grand heist movie, Inception, is way more than just a heist movie. It’s a fever dream involving a team that utilizes technology to dip into someone’s subconscious, usually to extrapolate information to better use for corporate espionage.
Dom Cobb is presented with a unique challenge - implant an idea instead of take one. If he can do that, he’ll also have his record cleared and be able to see his kids. Nolan was already an “event movie” director, but the stakes were never higher for him here in his follow up to The Dark Knight.
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