2020 was a bad year for movies. Blockbusters built for the theatrical experience were immediately streamed, and people found comfort in the familiar titles. Five years later, the science fiction movies we see on the silver screen have become weirder.
As we’ve grown comfortable with the idea of AI and robotics becoming a regular part of our lives, more movies are depicting apocalypses (remember the sequels to A Quiet Place?), and new stories are being told every day.
Now, everything isn’t great on the production side of things. 2023 saw the longest strike from SAG-AFTRA and the second-longest one from the Writers’ Guild. This came around at a time when Disney’s favorite money maker, the MCU, took repeated beatings at the box office. But Everything Everywhere All at Once and Godzilla: Minus One worked on shoestring budgets while churning out large profits.
The 2020-2025 timeline has been an interesting period. However, we need to examine the major stories, and we’ll begin by discussing the strike and its impact on the movies.
SAG-AFTRA and the Writers’ Guild go on Strike
Image credit: WikiCommons/By Eden, Janine and Jim from New York City.
In 2023, the actors’ and writers’ guilds of America went on strike. It was a long time coming. Social media lit up with writers and actors talking about how streaming services had cut them out of the profit chain.
As creatives firmly put out their demands, studios bled. Films like Captain America: Brave New World and Godzilla x Kong were postponed and later released, and some movies were postponed indefinitely.
With AI being one of the key reasons for the strike (writers and actors were anxious about being replaced by rapidly developing AI), it’s not surprising that the past two years have seen a rising number of movies dealing with the subject.
At the same time, smaller projects from outside Hollywood had their time to shine and made their mark. Independent films won awards, and the tentpole blockbusters had to take a breather. This meant a series of refreshing stories coming onto the screen.
The Indies Shone Again
From 2008 to 2020, if you wanted to see a blockbuster science fiction movie at the theaters, you were likely tuning into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The hype was well-deserved, as 23 films that covered the Infinity Saga became a global phenomenon, creating multiple multi-billion-dollar IPs.
Post Avengers: Endgame, though, the magic was getting stale. Marvel and Disney suffered back-to-back losses with Elementals and Ant-Man: QuantumMania being flops. Even more popular brands started to feel less like “events” and more like homework. Another multiverse, another color-graded sky beam, another quippy genius saving a world that looked suspiciously like a green screen.
It makes sense that the most interesting multiverse film of the past half-decade was Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie that was both original and audacious in its premise. Japan also had its chance to shine with Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, and Godzilla: Minus One, all of which turned out to be global hits.
After Yang was a poignant film about grief, and Vesper was a realistic and beautiful depiction of a world after climate collapse. If you spent the last five years waiting for the next superhero and science fiction blockbuster, you definitely missed out on some great films. So, let us help you with the ranking that will help you get caught up on the great stories that graced our theaters in between.
Without any more ado, here are our picks for the top indie sci-fi films of this half-decade:
1. Vesper (2022)
Vesper imagines a “New Dark Age” where Earth has become a toxic wasteland ruled from distant citadels, and a resourceful teenage girl struggles to care for her father on the desolate outskirts. You might not be thoroughly impressed with the characters and dialogue, but the film’s haunting world-building, evocative visuals, and eerie atmosphere more than make up for it.
2. Sputnik (2020)
Sputnik is a Russian indie sci-fi horror film set in the 1980s, where a disgraced but principled neurophysiologist is brought to a secret military facility to study a cosmonaut who has returned from orbit with an alien living inside him. It’s a grounded Russian spin on Alien and Arrival. This atmospheric, small-scale gem boasts tense character work, moral dilemmas, and a strong lead performance by Oksana Akinshina.
3. The Substance (2024)
The Substance is a 2024 body-horror film in which a radical new drug splits ageing TV fitness star Elisabeth into a younger double, Sue, forcing her to alternate weeks between bodies as she confronts vicious ageism and the seductive power of being seen as young again. The film is a ferocious yet necessary critique of beauty standards and prejudice. Demi Moore pulls off a fearless, career-best performance in this body horror from Coralie Fargeat.
4. La Bête (2023)
The Beast is a genre-blurring sci-fi romance that follows Gabrielle and Louis across 1910, 2014, and a 2044 AI-dominated future, where a system that “purifies” humans of emotion forces her to confront dread, death, and what it means to have a soul. Bonello’s film is an ambitious, existential riff on AI, love, and the modern obsession with safety and happiness.
In a way, the past five years of sci-fi have mirrored the world watching them: unstable, experimental, anxious about the future, but also strangely hopeful. The strikes exposed how fragile the industry really is, the superhero era finally lost its invincibility, and in the cracks of that system, a strange and beautiful crop of indie visions took root.
If the 2010s were about bigger, louder, and more connected cinematic universes, 2020–2025 quietly insisted on something else: that science fiction doesn’t need a billion dollars to imagine the end of the world or the shape of the next one. It just needs a strong idea, a camera, and someone willing to get weird with it.