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The 15 Best Sci-Fi Movies on Peacock in August 2024: M3GAN, Waterworld, Hulk & More
Peacock has a collection of new and old titles, including some of our science fiction faves!
Stories are the way we talk about the things we’re not good at talking about: love, death, fear, hope... We build proxies for ourselves that are better-looking, braver, or cleverer than we are, and we put them in the situations we can only imagine in order to explore the world as it is or as we wish it could be. Science fiction, more than perhaps any other genre, extends this unique form of cultural meditation to our own possible future.
Through science fiction, we see the ways the world might one day be, and we can make mistakes on page or screen in the hope that we don’t make them when they really come knocking. Because we can only build what we can first imagine, we’d serve ourselves well by sampling the many different potential futures available in our fictions.
If you’re looking for inspiration, Peacock’s collection of science fiction movies and television series might be the perfect place to start. To be sure, not all sci-fi flicks present an ideal future, and they might serve you better as a warning than a blueprint, but either way you’re sure to have a blast along the way. There are scores of movies and hundreds of episodes of science fiction to choose from, these are but some of our favorites.
What are the best sci-fi movies now streaming on Peacock?
M3GAN
Sometimes all you need is a friend who really gets you. When 9-year-old Cady’s parents are killed in a car accident, she goes to live with her aunt Gemma, a brilliant engineer and inventor working for the toy company Funki. Despite Gemma’s efforts, she struggles to keep her career afloat while caring for a child and opts instead to combine the two. Cady needs a friend, and Gemma needs someone to test her latest invention, the Model 3 Generative Android, M3GAN for short.
Things start out wonderfully. Cady is smiling and laughing for the first time since her parents died, M3GAN is performing better than expected, and Gemma’s bosses are happy. Of course, we all know that the other titanium shoe is about to drop. Like countless evil robots which came before her, M3GAN takes her directive to protect Cady from physical and emotional harm very seriously. So seriously that she’s willing to kill if that’s what it takes to keep Cady safe.
WATERWORLD
Waterworld, the now-classic post-apocalypse starring Kevin Costner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and Tina Majorino as survivors, quite literally adrift at the end of the world.
A few centuries from now, following runaway global warming, the planet’s ice caps have all melted. Sea level has risen roughly 25,000 feet all over the world, ostensibly burying every landmass on the planet. Mariner (Costner) is a lone wolf navigating the world ocean on a small wooden vessel. He also happens to be a mutant with gills tucked behind his ears.
Narrowly escaping death, Mariner joins up with the young Enola (Majorino) and her caregiver Hellen (Tripplehorn). See, Enola has a map to dry land tattooed on her back and nefarious forces (led by a completely bonkers Dennis Hopper) want those coordinates, even if they have to kill to get them.
HULK
Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe would rewrite the way we tell superhero stories, and only a year after Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie, Ang Lee gave us his vision of the Hulk in the appropriately named Hulk.
The movie tells the origin story of Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) and the angry alter ego who emerges after a laboratory accident involving gamma radiation. You know the drill. While Ang Lee’s Hulk received mixed reviews upon release, it has enjoyed something of revival in recent years as fans and critics revisit the movie nearly two decades later.
KNOWING
If you throw a dart at Nicolas Cage’s filmography there’s no way of knowing if you’re going to get a heartwarming and serious film or one of the weirdest movie experiences of your life. One thing you can be sure of, though, is that you’re going to have a good time. Knowing falls somewhere in the middle of the Cage Camp Continuum and sees him playing a mathematician who discovers a sequence of numbers which accurately predicts major disasters.
After banging his head against this apocalyptic sudoku puzzle he realizes the numbers identify the date, planetary coordinates, and body count of every major disaster going back centuries. There are only a few dates left before the end of the sequence, and with it, the end of the world.
LUCY
Lucy took some heat when it first hit theaters, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see it for what it is — a wacky sci-fi romp that’s as fun as it is unrealistic — even if that’s not what we expected or wanted when it dropped.
Lucy’s greatest scientific sin is leaning all the way into the disproven idea that we only use a portion of our brains. When Lucy (Scarlet Johansson) is accidentally exposed to an experimental drug, she gains enhanced mental and physical abilities as more of her brain is unlocked. By the end of the movie, she’s become so powerful that she is impervious to injury or pain and capable of psychically traveling through time. It’s the sort of movie brave enough to see the horizon of credulity and blithely traipse across it; and for that, we love it.
BATTLESHIP
Battleship is a bombastic sci-fi adventure directed by Peter Berg and based on the famously narrative-free board game by Hasbro. To play Battleship is to play in the waters of the past, recreating aquatic battles with oceanic warships. To watch Battleship is to see the future, a time in which humanity fights aliens for the fate of our planet.
It begins in an alternate 2005, when humanity discovers a habitable exoplanet known as Planet G. The following year we built an array to communicate with any intelligence who happens to be there. It was an incredible scientific undertaking and a deadly mistake.
Seven years after the planet was discovered, alien ships arrive on Earth and hide in the murky depths of the world’s oceans. Our only chance at survival is to find and destroy the alien battleships!
ALIENS ABDUCTED MY PARENTS AND NOW I FEEL KINDA LEFT OUT
Teenagers Calvin (Jacob Buster) and Itsy (Emma Tremblay) are unlikely friends growing up in a small town. Itsy is new, having just moved with her family from the big city, while Calvin has lived there all his life and become something of a town pariah.
Ten years earlier, Calvin’s folks disappeared during the once-a-decade appearance of the fictional comet Jesper. Calvin becomes convinced that his mom and dad were snatched up by alien visitors and that he’ll be able to join them when the comet returns. His entire life becomes a preparation for the imminent reappearance of the comet.
What follows is a heartfelt sci-fi coming of age story from screenwriter Austin Osanai Everett and director Jake Van Wagoner that is both out of this world and totally grounded right here on Earth.
DONNIE DARKO
Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult classic, Donnie Darko, continues to demand rewatches and command late-night barguments two decades after release. Set in 1988, the titular Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) is awoken by a mysterious voice. Following it, he encounters a creepy, humanoid rabbit named Frank who tells Donnie the world will end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.
Strange as that encounter was, it saved Donnie from certain death when an airplane engine crashed into his bedroom. From there, a bizarre series of events unfolds involving tangent universes, multiverse artifacts, time traveling ghosts, and the entangled fates of one boy and the entire universe.
APOLLO 18
NASA’s Apollo program came to a close in 1972 with the successful return of Apollo 17. The program ended early, scrapping three planned crewed missions, Apollos 18 - 20. The history books will tell you that’s where things ended but director Gonzalo López-Gallego imagined an alternate history in the 2011 found footage film Apollo 18.
After Apollo officially ended, the 18th mission was reactivated as a Top Secret Department of Defense mission to deliver a classified payload to the Moon’s South Pole. The deadly events that follow go a long way to explaining why the footage was buried and the mission never spoken of. If you know the Moon landings happened but still want a little conspiracy, as a treat, this is the movie for you.
TURBO KID
Turbo Kid isn’t, strictly speaking, a vision of the future, but we’ll let it slide because it’s INCREDIBLE. It takes place in an alternate reality 1997, in a world struggling for water. The tyrannical overlord Zeus (played perfectly by Michael Ironside) captures people from the Wasteland and crushes them to get their water. It’s a tough world to live in when you’re a kid who just wants to ride his bike and read comic books.
When The Kid meets Apple, a friendship model robot, the two of them embark on a coming-of-age story like none you’ve ever seen. It’s equal parts Napoleon Dynamite and Mad Max, with a disturbingly hilarious amount of blood splatter. It’s a post-apocalyptic fever dream as imagined by a Power Glove-wearing teenager from the ‘80s. It’s perfect.
EUROPA REPORT
Europa is one of Jupiter’s four largest moons (the so-called Galilean moons) and it’s covered in a global sheet of ice. Beneath that ice, thanks to the tidal forces between Europa, Jupiter, and its dozens of other moons, is a world-spanning ocean of liquid water. Research suggests activity at the surface transports oxygen and salts into the water, and seafloor vents could provide a source of nutrients and heat. With a bit of luck, life could spring up there and thrive in a lightless ocean world.
Europa Report imagines the sort of mission we dream of, sending brave explorers to an alien world to see it for themselves. Sadly, things don’t go to plan. That’s clear from the jump, because the story is narrated not by any of the crewmembers, but by the CEO of Europa Ventures, Dr. Samantha Unger. A crewed mission is sent to the icy moon, looking for life. In space, you should be careful what you wish for.
Upon landing, they drill through the ice and release a probe. One crew member sees a blue light in the distance but is dismissed as being sleep deprived. All doubt evaporates when the underwater probe sees a similar light just moments before being destroyed. There’s life on Europa, alright, and it isn’t happy.
DREDD
In 1995, director Danny Cannon lifted the character of Judge Dredd from its namesake comic strip and onto the silver screen; it didn’t do well. In 2012 the character got the onscreen adaptation he deserved from director Pete Travis and screenwriter Alex Garland (Ex Machina) in the simply titled Dredd.
In a near-future dystopia, Judges like Dredd are given full authority over enforcement of the law, including judgment, sentencing, and execution. Dredd (Karl Urban) is sent to a 200-story apartment building ruled by Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), a drug lord controlling the flow of a designer time-distorting drug. Once inside, Ma-Ma locks the place down behind nuclear blast doors and puts a price on Dredd’s head. Things only get worse from there.
MEN IN BLACK
If you didn’t know any better, Men in Black begins like so many other police dramas from the late ‘90s. NYPD officer James Edwards (Will Smith) encounters a criminal with an uncanny ability for escape who turns out to be an extraterrestrial. He’s given a brief glimpse into the world as it really is, and he’s given a choice: to stay and see how strange things really are or forget it all and return to his ordinary life. It’s no real choice at all. James is swept into the secret world of the Men in Black, a covert organization tasked with protecting humanity from the universe’s many alien entities, many of whom are living among us.
After erasing his identity and all of his name except for the first letter, J learns that the Earth has been established as a neutral zone for alien refugees and there’s a sort of tenuous peace between us and the rest of the cosmos. That is until a bug-like alien body-snatches a backwoods farmer named Edgar (Vincent D’Onofrio) in an attempt to locate a hidden galaxy and spark interstellar war. To prevent the galaxy from falling into the bugs’ pedipalps, the Arquillians — an advanced alien race — are willing to destroy the Earth. Only J and his partner K (Tommy Lee Jones) can save us.
Once you’re finished saving the world for the first time, you can follow the continued adventures of the MIB in Men in Black II and Men in Black 3.
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000
You never know what a new day might bring. If you’re very unlucky you might be kidnapped by a group of mad scientists, shuttled aboard an interstellar spacecraft, and forced to watch bad movies until your connection with reality shatters. If you find yourself in that situation, it helps to have a few friends.
When Joel Robinson found himself in this exact unlikely but hilarious situation, and without any friends, he built some from scratch using pieces of the ship. Those friends are known as Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, and GPC. And they, along with the human test subject (first Joel, then a smattering of other folks over time), watch bad movies and crack wise to make them a little less painful. The great thing about Mystery Science Theater 3000, is it isn’t just one bad movie, but so many. So many, that eventually they start to look pretty good.
UPSIDE DOWN
Juan Diego Solanas’ 2012 film Upside Down, blurs the lines between science fiction and fantasy to tell a cosmic love story only possible in our imaginations. We enter the worlds of Upside Down through the eyes of Adam (Jim Sturgess). He’s an ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances, a citizen of a binary planet system with an impossible gravitational relationship.
The two worlds, known only as Up and Down, share a gravitational field, allowing them to orbit in incredibly close proximity to one another. But that doesn’t mean that residents of the two worlds travel freely between them. On these worlds, matter adheres to a few seemingly inalienable rules. First and most important, all matter is only attracted to the gravity of its home world. Second, matter can be counterbalanced by “inverse” matter from the opposing world. Finally, contact with inverse matter is temporary and results in spontaneous combustion after a few hours.
Adam might have been satisfied to live out his life on one world, but when he meets Eden, a woman from Up, they set about rewriting both the laws of their society and the laws of physics.
Stream these great sci-fi movies and many more on Peacock!
