10 Best Sci-Fi Movie Remakes Of All Time, Ranked

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It feels like the only movies that get made any more are reboots, sequels, and rehashes of the best films from Hollywood's past, and the science fiction genre in particular is victim to many of these failed attempts to revive a dormant IP, like the misbegotten 2012 remake of "Total Recall" that even Colin Farrell probably doesn't remember he was in. That's what makes the rare remake that surpasses the original so special, and in this list we're going to break down 10 of the best sci-fi movie remakes of all time.

Some of these films took an established movie and twisted into a new, more horrifying form. Or maybe they used the latest in special effects to create something truly out of this world. Perhaps they simply took everything from the original film and leaned into what made it work, while excising anything that didn't. In any case, there's no doubt that these 10 films aren't just the best remakes in the genre, but have become some of the best sci-fi movies of all time in their own right.

• Cast: Karl Urban, Olivia Thirlby, Lena Headey

• Director: Pete Travis

• Rating: R

• Runtime: 95 minutes

• Where to watch (rental or purchase): Prime Video

Coming in at No.10 is a film that even Alex Garland superfans might have missed. Before he was the director of blockbusters like "Civil War," Garland was one of the industry's most in-demand science fiction screenwriters, and following the acclaim of "28 Days Later," "Sunshine," and "Never Let Me Go," he tackled this revived attempt at a Judge Dredd film.

While 1995's "Judge Dredd" starring Sylvester Stallone has its defenders, it largely fails to live up to the promise of the comic series it's based on. The 2012 film "Dredd" promises a more authentic portrayal of this walking, talking judge, jury and executioner. Taking massive inspiration from the underground 2011 action hit "The Raid: Redemption," "Dredd" tasks the Judge (Karl Urban) with fighting his way up a 200-floor tower ruled over by drug lord Ma-Ma (Lena Headey).

Garland's script leans into the harsh black-and-white morality of the "Judge Dredd" comics, emphasizing the brutal logic at the core of this one-man army, while highlighting the absurdity of the premise in a way that is both entertaining and downright chilling. According to Karl Urban, Garland essentially directed "Dredd" in addition to writing it, and its influence on his latest films, "Civil War" and "Warfare," can be felt in the bludgeoning and tactile gunfire that permeates "Dredd."

• Cast: Kevin Dillon, Shawnee Smith, Donovan Leitch, Jeffrey DeMunn

• Director: Chuck Russell

• Rating: R

• Runtime: 95 minutes

• Where to watch (rental or purchase): Prime Video, Apple TV

The 1954 film "The Blob" is a classic Cold War-era creature feature, in which an asteroid unleashes a hungry alien that slowly grows to devour everything in its path. Its 1988 remake, directed by Chuck Russell, takes that premise and turns it up to the extreme. Transplanting the classic Americana of the '50s to Reagan-era paranoia, Russell turns a fairly by-the-book B-movie into a true cult masterpiece.

The story follows high school football star Paul (Donovan Leitch) and his cheerleader girlfriend Meg (Shawnee Smith) as they cross paths with motorcycle-riding bad boy Brian (Kevin Dillon) on a dark road. They discover the mysterious creature, and when it devours poor Paul, the cops don't seem to take them seriously. It's only when the blob grows to tremendous size, devouring an entire movie theater's worth of people, that the authorities realize what they're up against, and at that point, it's too late to stop it.

What makes "The Blob" special is its wonderfully realized special effects that still look amazing to this day. The blob is brought to life using good old-fashioned goop, not CGI, giving the film an unsettlingly tactile feel that will ooze over you and seep under your skin.

• Cast: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum

• Director: Phillip Kaufman

• Rating: R

• Runtime: 115 minutes

• Where to watch: Tubi, PlutoTV, The Roku Channel

Like "The Blob," 1978's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is another reboot of a '50s black and white sci-fi classic (from a novel by Jack Finney), but where "The Blob" leans into the spectacle and bombast that its modern special effects are capable of, "Body Snatchers" instead uses the template of an alien invasion movie to create something far more unnerving and unsettling than ever before.

It all starts when a strange intergalactic flower takes root in San Francisco, and young scientist Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) tries to examine what this peculiar specimen is. It turns out to be a race of parasitic aliens fleeing their dying planet and taking root on ours. One by one, these plants ingest and replace flesh and blood humans with unthinking, unfeeling alien pod people.

It's a premise that is as old as the science fiction genre itself, most recently echoed by the Apple TV series "Pluribus," but "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" remains one of the best examples of the alien invasion trope, thanks to director Phillip Kaufman's eerie compositions and a chilling performance by "Star Trek" veteran Leonard Nimoy, with an absolutely crushing ending that will leave you speechless.

• Cast: Rick Moranis, Ellen Greene, Levi Stubbs

• Director: Frank Oz

• Rating: PG-13

• Runtime: 94 minutes

• Where to watch: Tubi, Sling, Plex

This is another film about a man-eating plant from another world, albeit with a much jazzier attitude: Frank Oz's 1986 film turns schlock master Roger Corman's 1960 B-picture into a stunning musical revue, adapting the off-Broadway show created by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman.

Nebbishy Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) works in a flower shop and pines over his abused sweetheart Audrey (Ellen Greene). After he discovers a mysterious plant at a Chinese flower shop, Seymour christens it Audrey II in tribute to his beloved, but when he accidentally pricks his finger on Audrey II's sharp teeth, he discovers the blood-sucking plant grows larger and more intelligent the more blood it consumes.

This discovery brings Seymour and his shop fame and fortune, but keeping the plant alive forces Seymour to feed his enemies and bullies to the hungry plant. In order to coerce him into obeying, the plant does what no other plant has done before: it sings, thanks to the vocal stylings of Four Tops singer Levi Stubbs. These toe-tapping songs are veritable earworms, and while we never got to watch the original ending — in which Audrey II grows so large it can smash the whole planet like Godzilla, which proved too dark for audiences at the time — it remains a daring and successful adaptation.

• Cast: Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt

• Director: Terry Gilliam

• Rating: R

• Runtime: 129 minutes

• Where to watch: Prime Video

Chris Marker's 1962 short film "La Jeteé" is a remarkable piece of art history. Told almost entirely through still images, it recounts the journey of a post-apocalyptic survivor who is sent back in time to "call past and future to the rescue of the present." With its avant-garde form and elliptical story, "La Jeteé" isn't the first film you would think to adapt into a big-budget Universal movie, but Terry Gilliam's 1995 "12 Monkeys" does exactly that.

While the film sheds the short's iconic use of photography in lieu of traditional moving images, Gilliam brings his own vivid imagination to create a dreamlike dystopia unlike anything you've seen before or since. Brad Pitt netted his first Oscar nomination for the role of a raving lunatic who may or may not be responsible for the end of the world in the future, but it's Bruce Willis' understated performance that really shines as he anchors the film in reality with his charm and pathos, even when Gilliam throws everything but the kitchen sink onto the screen.

A successful adaptation of Marker's classic, some will say that "12 Monkeys" is Gilliams' best film, especially considering it's the rare effort of his to make it through the studio system more or less intact.

• Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias

• Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

• Rating: R

• Runtime: 118 minutes

• Where to watch: Peacock

As the latest movie on this list, 2025's "Bugonia" might be something of a controversial pick. After three film collaborations between actress and producer Emma Stone and writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos, the announcement that the pair would be remaking the South Korean sci-fi film "Save the Green Planet!" was met with some bemused responses, with many wondering if the pair could possibly top their Oscar-winning work in 2023's "Poor Things."

But what makes "Bugonia" such a wonderful remake is that it retains the core thesis of the original film — with its nihilistic view of humanity that leads to an absolutely wild and disturbing ending – and uses it as a jumping-off point for an extremely potent portrait of modern American conspiracy theories. Yorgos' films don't often reflect our real world, operating instead with a kind of dream logic that keeps us at arm's length from the characters emotionally, but thanks to career-best work by Jesse Plemons (who was horrifically snubbed by the Oscars), we are forced to reckon with our empathy for his plight and his dangerous, conspiracy-minded thinking.

Is Plemons' Teddy Gantz a hero trying to save humanity from Stone's alien CEO Michelle Fuller? Or is he a deranged madman holding an innocent woman hostage? "Bugonia" is not an easy film to watch, but its commitment to the plight of its characters elevates it beyond its source material, which failed to juggle its various tones and influences for its whole runtime.

• Cast: Timotheé Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya

• Director: Denis Villeneuve

• Rating: PG-13

• Runtime: 156 minutes

• Where to watch: HBO Max

George Lucas' "Star Wars" takes massive inspiration from Frank Herbert's "Dune," a seminal work of science fiction about a young man living on a remote desert planet who finds himself saddled with the responsibility of shepherding the future of the whole universe. So when "Star Wars" became the ultimate summer blockbuster, producer Dino De Laurentiis attempted to bring the original into theaters with visionary director David Lynch at the helm.

This proved to be an awkward combination, with 1984's "Dune" becoming a box office bomb that reshaped Lynch's trajectory from mainstream filmmaker to independent dream weaver. It wasn't until 2021 that Hollywood would attempt another big-budget film adaptation of "Dune," when Denis Villeneuve took the helm of a star-studded remake that placed Timotheé Chalamet into the role of the galaxy's reluctant savior and conqueror, Paul Atreides.

Where Lynch's "Dune" was saddled with condensing Herbert's dense novel into one film, Villeneuve was freed to split the book in half, allowing him to translate the epic scope of the world into a towering achievement of blockbuster filmmaking.

• Cast: Hiroki Hasegawa, Yutaka Takenouchi, Satomi Ishihara

• Director: Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi

• Rating: PG-13

• Runtime: 120 minutes

• Where to watch: HBO Max

The original "Godzilla" was born out of Japan's still fresh trauma over the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. War veteran and film director Ishiro Honda channeled these lingering anxieties into the 1954 giant monster movie, in which the nation's fear of being subjected to another devastating attack is personified by the apocalyptic force of the monstrous Gojira, a strange beast known as a kaiju.

This film was a smash hit in Japan, resulting in copious sequels, and in the process Godzilla was flattened from a symbol of national grieving into an official ambassador of Japan. The big guy had lost his symbolic meaning, and with it, his terrifying edge. That is, until he was reborn in 2016's "Shin Godzilla."

This modern reimagining brought Godzilla firmly into the 21st century, pitting him not against another kaiju, but rather against the bureaucracy of Japanese democracy. The result is a political satire that plays more like "Dr. Strangelove" than the bombastic American Godzilla films, mixed with the attention to detail made famous by director Hideaki Anno in his landmark anime series "Neon Genesis Evangelion." The hit standalone follow-up, "Godzilla Minus One" (also a remake of the original "Godzilla"), may have caught international and Oscar attention, but it's "Shin Godzilla" that remains one of the best Godzilla movies in the franchise's storied history. It retains the melancholic heart and soul of the original and translates it into a film that is thoroughly relevant to here and now.

• Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Geena Davis, John Getz

• Director: David Cronenberg

• Rating: R

• Runtime: 96 minutes

• Where to watch (rental or purchase): Prime Video, Apple TV 

Throughout his career, David Cronenberg has used cinema to reimagine what horrific shapes and forms the human body can take. Called "body horror," his films frequently center on the ways in which our flesh and blood can be mutilated beyond recognition, and what the consequences of that mean for the nature of our humanity. Cronenberg found the perfect outlet for this fascination in the 1958 film "The Fly," about a scientist who tests his teleportation machine with an unwitting passenger: a common housefly.

In the original film, the scientist's (David Hedison) head and arm are swapped with that of the fly, but in Cronenberg's twisted remake, the process is far more gruesome and tragic. Here, scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is excited to show off the surprising side effects of his teleportation machine to his new muse Veronica (Geena Davis), but as he slowly uncovers the reality of what's gone wrong, he's helpless to reverse the process. Instead he begins to molt and transform into a horrific human-fly hybrid that loses all sense of humanity, leading to a devastating emotional climax for the couple, with Oscar-winning makeup effects that make Brundle's transformation viscerally tangible.

Channeling Goldblum and Davis' off-screen romance into the story, the film is less a horror film than a tragic love story, and all the better for it.

• Cast: Kurt Russell, Keith David, Wilford Brimley, Donald Moffat

• Director: John Carpenter

• Rating: R

• Runtime: 109 min

• Where to watch (rental or purchase): Prime Video, Apple TV, Fandango

It's hard to believe it now, but John Carpenter's "The Thing" was once seen as a failure. This would-be summer blockbuster debuted in the summer of 1982 and flopped at the box office, with audiences choosing to spend their time with the far more optimistic "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" instead.

But time has been more than kind to "The Thing." Carpenter was always a workhorse of the horror genre, smashing out one seminal horror flick after another, and all of his skills were refined into "The Thing," a chilling, paranoid remake of the 1951 film "The Thing from Another World" (with both adapted from the classic 1938 John W. Campbell Jr. novella "Who Goes There?").

As both a work of science fiction and horror, "The Thing" deftly melds both genres together via an alien creature that is capable of perfectly replicating any living organism. As it is set loose on an Arctic research station, no one is quite sure who they can trust anymore. Fear and paranoia set in and the base erupts into chaos, with the fate of humanity on the line. With a pulse-pounding score and a star-making performance by Kurt Russell, "The Thing" is now widely considered to be one of the best, if not the best, sci-fi/horror movies of all time. Take that, E.T.