5 Best Stephen King Sci-Fi Movies, Ranked

He's best known as the king of horror, but Stephen King has long proven to be a master of countless other genres across his long and storied career. From tear-jerking emotional epics like "The Green Mile" to coming-of-age tales like "The Body" (later adapted as "Stand by Me"), he's been a reliable source of best-selling page-turners in the over 50 years since his debut novel. Aside from stories about things that go bump in the night, he's most prolific as a science-fiction author, and many of those works have been adapted to the screen — with considerably mixed results. Below, we've counted down five of the best.

But before we could rank, we had to determine what does and doesn't count as a sci-fi story. For example, last year's "The Long Walk" is the tale of a dystopian future gameshow not entirely dissimilar to "The Running Man," but it takes place in the sparse countryside with no additional high-concept world-building. Because of this, it would be a stretch to qualify here. Similarly, "The Life of Chuck" is a big narrative swing that opens with the end of the world. Without spoiling the movie, it's a deceptive opening, and it would be a little too cheeky of us to count it as sci-fi on that basis; it's far closer to a fantasy tearjerker.

The following five films all share unambiguous sci-fi concepts and are more concerned with exploring those ideas than on developing the creeping sense of dread that characterizes King's horror work. It's not a comprehensive list of every sci-fi adaptation from his catalogue, so as always, please prepare to yell at us for any glaring omission from this list.

• Cast: Drew Barrymore, David Keith, Freddie Jones
• Director: Mark L. Lester
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 114 minutes
• Where to watch: Prime Video, AppleTV, YouTube

As this is only a top five feature and not a comprehensive ranking of every Stephen King sci-fi adaptation, we thankfully didn't have to revisit the 2022 Blumhouse remake of "Firestarter" for this list — and revisiting the original only reaffirms what that misguided adaptation got wrong. The 1984 original was dubbed "one of the worst of the bunch" when King was once asked about movies inspired by his work by Toronto Film Review, which we suspect is largely due to the confined nature of the second half, drastically halting the urgency of the cat-and-mouse chase thriller up to that point and transforming the story into a more stripped-down supernatural character drama. However, that first half does a great job of developing the relationship between father Andrew McGee (David Keith) and his telekinetic daughter Charlie (Drew Barrymore), offering tense stakes to every showdown with the authorities who want to capture her — which were absent from the dull remake.

As Charlie's pyrokinesis abilities prove difficult to handle, director Mark L. Lester – taking over from John Carpenter, who was fired from the production after "The Thing" underperformed — indulges in set piece after set piece of glorious practical fire effects, and is aided throughout by Tangerine Dream's dreamy score. It's a highly stylized thrill ride, which stands in stark contrast to the opening acts, making for one of the bolder King adaptations we'd had up to this point. If King was right about this being one of the weakest films inspired by his work (and let's be clear: he isn't), then this would be a low point most would envy.

• Cast: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie Holden
• Director: Frank Darabont
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 126 minutes
• Where to watch: Fawesome, Plex, The Roku Channel

After making his name as a director with two other Stephen King adaptations — "The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile," both nominated for Best Picture — Frank Darabont made something a lot less Oscar-friendly with the bleakest entry on this list. "The Mist" is one of the most divisive King adaptations to this day due to how it radically alters the ending of his original novella, transforming an ambiguous but optimistic ending into what might be the most despairing of any major Hollywood horror release. If you've never seen it, we won't spoil — especially because King himself said in a press conference that anybody that did "should be hung from their neck until dead" (via FirstShowing.net).

The film's lower ranking on this list is due to the fact that it operates less successfully as a Lovecraftian monster movie as it does a paranoid thriller, with the characters locked inside the supermarket all representing different sections of post-9/11 American society, their divisions as much a threat to their life as the creatures outside. Naturally, the movie has only managed to maintain relevance in the nearly 20 years since its original theatrical release, still feeling like an accurate representation of the divided social landscape in Trump's America; and in that sense, the devastating finale has aged like fine wine. "The Mist" split opinion in both critical and audience response upon release, but time has been kind to it. That being said, it's still a far stronger allegorical tale than it is a good, old-fashioned sci-fi splatterfest.

• Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonso, Yaphet Kotto
• Director: Paul Michael Glaser
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 101 minutes
• Where to watch: Paramount+, Fubo, Hoopla

When it comes to satirical '80s sci-fi, "Robocop" will always be undefeated as the champion of the genre. But the original take on the novel "The Running Man" by Stephen King — sorry, "Richard Bachman" — is underrated for its exploration of the politics and media of the time, hidden in plain sight beneath a dystopian setting. The film has always been the subject of debate when discussing King adaptations because of how it transformed protagonist Ben Richards from an unemployed everyman, desperate to find any way to earn money to provide for his family, into an Arnold Schwarzenegger action hero. His Ben is an army captain in the totalitarian U.S., framed for committing a massacre of rioters after refusing orders to kill them. After going into hiding, he is swiftly approached by the host of a murderous game show, desperate for a notorious contestant to help with the ratings.

However, even as "The Running Man" takes numerous liberties when translating the source material to the screen, it is harder to argue against it as an extremely entertaining Schwarzenegger star vehicle — despite the fact that it relies more on his action persona than his way with a comic quip. The Austrian is an unwavering straight man in this fascist, consumerist dystopia. "Superman's" Christopher Reeve was originally cast as Ben Richards, and the movie was drastically rewritten once he bowed out of the production. The assumption is that iteration of the movie would have looked a lot closer to Edgar Wright's superior 2025 adaptation than it would the movie we originally got, but the 1987 flick is a very fun slice of '80s action nonetheless.

• Cast: Glen Powell, David Zayas, Greg Townley
• Director: Edgar Wright
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 133 minutes
• Where to watch: Paramount+, MGM+, Fubo

In 2017, Edgar Wright told Alamo Drafthouse that the one movie he'd love to remake was "The Running Man" (via YouTube), as the Stephen King novel needed a more faithful screen adaptation than the very loose 1987 take. As played by Glen Powell, this take on Ben Richards was a near-identical everyman to the one in the novel; a newly fired blue collar worker who needed to raise money for his daughter's healthcare in a dystopian state, resorting to competing on violent TV shows as his only option to win cash. With Wright's trademark sense of humor and track record of staging exceptional action set pieces, the bulk of the movie lived up to the potential of the novel; and despite its overt revolutionary themes, it was a far better fit for the director's style than expected.

Almost everybody agreed that the movie fell at the final hurdle, as Wright and co-screenwriter Michael Bacall (who had previously worked together on "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World") pulled punches when it came to translating the bleak, destructive ending of the novel. In both, Ben becomes a savior to the masses, as his killing streak on the show suggests that the public are no longer powerless against those in charge — but the overall outcomes diverge. King approved Wright and Bacall's narrative changes, but in a movie that was attempting to chime with anti-government sentiments around the world, a finale significantly happier than the one in the book felt like the result of panicked studio notes. Sure, doing a straightforward adaptation of the source material's climax would hardly be crowd pleasing, but it would be bold and wouldn't feel like punches had been pulled at the very last minute. Everything that precedes that third act stumble is why this film is so high in our ranking.

• Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt
• Director: David Cronenberg
• Rating: R
• Runtime: 103 minutes
• Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube

Before he played one of the most beloved fictional presidents in "The West Wing," Martin Sheen played a man set to be one of the most destructive in David Cronenberg's "The Dead Zone." During this period of Cronenberg's career, the Canadian auteur was synonymous with body horror, going increasingly large-scale with Hollywood productions like "Videodrome" and surprise blockbuster "The Fly." Fresh off the telekinetic thriller "Scanners," the big surprise with his Stephen King adaptation is that it's far more attuned to his psychological work than the visceral extremes of this era.

King and Cronenberg are a match made in heaven, and the eternally idiosyncratic Christopher Walken — playing schoolteacher Johnny Smith, gifted a power to see the future after a five-year coma — is a surprisingly effective in-over-his-head everyman that is given a series of moral dilemmas about changing the course of history. It hasn't lingered in the cultural memory as much as other King adaptations and Cronenberg movies of this era — critically divisive movies like Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" and the aforementioned box office bomb "Videodrome" quickly became more influential — but it was greeted as one of the finer adaptations of a King novel. Film critic Roger Ebert even declared it the best to date in 1983 (via RogerEbert.com). This is largely because screenwriter Jeffrey Boam greatly condensed the source story, making for a more concise morality play rather than a sprawling, episodic tale of one man reckoning with the limitations of his power. In the best possible way, it feels like a feature-length "Twilight Zone" episode — and proved that Cronenberg could make as good a popcorn blockbuster as he could an arthouse squirm-fest.