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The Best Sci-Fi Movies on Peacock in April 2024: Spider-Man, Nope & 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.
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What are the best sci-fi movies now streaming on Peacock?
SAM RAIMI’S SPIDER-MAN COLLECTION
Director Sam Raimi was most well-known for his Evil Dead flicks, when he brought Spider-Man to the big screen in 2002. Today, a blockbuster Spider-Man movie seems like a surefire way to make a billion dollars, but it wasn’t such a sure thing 20+ years ago.
Raimi’s interpretation of the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man and friends is responsible in part for the popularity of superhero media in the following two decades. It tells the familiar origin story of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as he learns the power and responsibility that comes with being Spider-Man. James Franco, Kirsten Dunst, and Willem Dafoe turn in performances as Peter’s best friend Harry Osborn, romantic interest Mary Jane Watson, and CEO turned supervillain Norman Osborn, respectively. J.K. Simmons also delivers a definitive performance as the curmudgeonly newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson.
If one arachnid adventure isn’t enough to wet your mandibles, Raimi delivered two sequels, each with their own raised stakes and new villains. You can watch the entire trilogy right now, on Peacock.
DONNIE DARKO
Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly’s 2001 cult classic, 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.
PAUL
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost emerged as a hilarious comedy duo at the turn of the century in the short-lived comedy series Spaced. They would hit the mainstream a few years later with the release of Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End.
Outside of Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy (the aforementioned trio of narratively unrelated comedies), Pegg and Frost have worked together on a number of other projects including the sci-fi road trip movie Paul. Co-written by Pegg and Frost, the story follows a pair of self-described geeks on a UFO themed road trip ending at San Diego Comic-Con. Along the way, they encounter Paul (Seth Rogen), an extraterrestrial who takes them on an out of this world adventure.
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.
In the film, 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.
MELANCHOLIA
Director Lars von Trier isn’t known for making comfortable movies and, while Melancholia might be his most approachable, it isn’t exactly fun. The story follows Justine (Kirsten Dunst) as her friends and family gather at a mountaintop mansion for her wedding.
Things should be happy, but they’re not, partly because Justine is depressed and partly because a rogue planet named Melancholia is rapidly approaching the Earth. The overt apocalyptic imagery bumped up against Justine’s personal collapse makes a global apocalypse feel intimate. And it lets von Trier talk about mental illness in a way that isn’t subtle but is effective.
THE ONE
The 2001 sci-fi action flick The One features some familiar science fiction tropes coupled with the martial arts chops of action star Jet Li. Back before the multiverse was the favorite narrative device of filmmakers everywhere, The One imagined a world in which criminals evade capture by jumping from one reality to the next.
Li plays multiple characters. More accurately, he plays multiple multiverse variants of the same character. One of those variants is Gabriel Yula, an ex-agent of The MultiVerse Authority, an organization tasked with keeping the spacetime chaos to a minimum. Yula goes rogue and starts hunting down his alternates throughout the multiverse, soaking up their power, Highlander style. If he kills them all, Yula will become a godlike being of infinite power known as The One, and he only has one more variant left.
MR. PEABODY & SHERMAN
This 2014 animated family film from Rob Minkoff (The Lion King, Stuart Little) became an instant classic and got that one Bastille song stuck in our heads all at the same time. It stars Ty Burrell and Max Charles as the titular characters, who first appeared in supporting segments of Rocky & Bullwinkle, called Peabody’s Improbable History. Fun Fact: It isn’t the first film adaptation of one of Rocky and Bullwinkle’s friends, that honor goes to Dudley Do-Right, starring the always beloved Brendan Fraser.
The story introduces us to Peabody and Sherman, the genius dog-ordinary kid duo just trying to make it in the modern world, or in whichever era they happen to be in at the moment. See, Mr. Peabody is truly brilliant, having built a time traveling device called the WABAC. Our heroes use the WABAC to travel through time having fun adventures and learning about history.
Trying to impress a classmate, Sherman takes the WABAC and messes up the past. When Sherman realizes the situation is too much for him to handle, he and his classmate travel to a few minutes before they left to ask for Peabody’s help. But when the two versions of Sherman touch, they merge, sending a shockwave ripping through spacetime.
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.
NOPE
While Jordan Peele has emerged as one of the most talented horror filmmakers on the scene, his movies all involve an element of science fiction not too far beneath the surface. Get Out and Us explore the scarifying consequences of mind transfers and cloning to ramp up the horror, but also as a way of getting at societal failings.
In Nope, Peele puts the sci-fi elements center stage with the discovery, exploration, and survival from an extraterrestrial entity flying over Jupiter’s Claim. A science fiction horror western with an unknown and unknowable creature at its center coupled with the tense relationships and troubled pasts of the characters makes for a perfect mixture which might leave you feeling grateful for your comparably quiet life.
Stream these great sci-fi movies and many more on Peacock!
