Sci-Fi Film History

The history of science fiction films parallels that of the motion picture industry as a whole, although it took several decades before the genre was taken seriously. Since the 1960s, major science fiction films have succeeded in pulling in large audience shares, and films of this genre have become a regular staple of the film industry.

Sci-Fi Subgenres A to Z

Many sci-fi fans know that there are a variety of subgenres under the umbrella of science fiction, but after doing some research online, I had no idea how deep that cyber-well really is. Explore all the sci-fi subgenres from A to Z.

1950's Sci-Fi Movies

Giant heads, giant eyes, and giant beasts ruled the screen
By T. F. Powell

The fifties ushered in some of the most cheesiest, yet glorious alien creatures in the history of sci-fi film. Some hold the opinion that the popular onslaught was in part spawned from military air and naval personnel reporting strange sightings during World War II.

SFMZ's Sci-Fi Art Gallery

When it comes to science fiction art, there's a rich diversity of talent on the web who explore the artistic cosmos with incredibly fantastic visual realms. In this section, we showcase known and unknown artists who paint the universe with amazing creativity.

The Greatest Hand Weapons of Sci-Fi Film

By SFMZ Guest Writer BobLava

SFMZ guest writer BobLava put together a list of the greatest sci-fi movie hand weapons. The firepower he listed would easily dispatch the biggest and baddest villains or creatures on film.

Sci-Fi Lists From Other Sites

Compiling 'Best of' lists regarding sci-film is very popular among the movie websites and we have collected a few links for you to explore.

SFMZ's Top Ten Sci-Fi Films of All Time!

We sampled ten popular online top sci-fi film polls to determine SFMZ's Top Ten Sci-Fi Films of All Time.

Based on their average ranking per poll, each film was measured how well it fared in the lists. Only films that appear in at least seven of the ten polls were measured.

With each poll on the left, we provide how their poll was determined. As you can see it is a mixture of input from fans, critics, film societies, website staff, and more.

This is why we selected these ten popular polls, to give our poll a diversity of contribution.

Sci-Fi Stands Tall in SFMZ's Top Ten Sequels of All Time!

Six of ten films that made the list are Sci-Fi including Cameron's Aliens and Terminator 2

Using the same formula for SFMZ's Top Ten Sci-Fi Films of All Time, we sampled ten online top sequels polls to determine SFMZ's Top Sequels of All Time. Based on their average ranking per poll, each film was measured how well it fared in the lists provided. Only films that appear in at least five of the ten polls were measured.

Calculation Example: The Godfather II appeared in all ten polls and holds the rankings of 1st (seven of them), 2nd, 4th, and 6th. These rankings total 18 divided by 10 (the number of polls it appeared), creating an average of 1.80 (The lower the score the better).

SFMZ's Top Sci-Fi Movie Planets

Sci-fi films featuring alien worlds is a common and popular vehicle for their imaginary tale, though only a few truly explore their fictional universe to any extensive degree.

From Dune to Pandora, some sci-fi movie planets capture the movie-goer's hearts with various aspects such as environment, indigenous species, social structure, and more (often inspired or adapted from literature).

What is the best sci-fi movie planet, planetoid, moon of the lot? We gathered a list of sci-fi rondures of wonder for you to decide by voting for what's the number one fictional planet.

SFMZ's Eight Greatest Weapons of Mass Destruction
of Sci-Fi Film

Whether they are needed to liquify our armies or level entire cities, sci-fi film's mega-weapons showed us how to reign global destruction supreme

Keeping in theme with our previous sci-fi list 'The Greatest Hand Weapons of Sci-Fi Film,' we decided to expand on the checklists of doom by upgrading on a Herculean scale with sci-fi movie weapons packing an almighty powerful punch.

In the new millennium, the abbreviation WMD became a common insert in post 911 era news media, but long before that, sci-fi film has served up a maelstrom of annihilation for decades now.

The Greatest CGI Scenes in Sci-Fi Film

Special effects and sci-fi film seem to go together like baseball and hotdogs, it goes without saying the genre demands it. Of course special effects existed before the computer age, it just had to employ other means of illusion such as optical & mechanical techniques, prosthetics, props, scale models, animatronics, and more.

With the introduction of computer graphics, this new craft opened the sci-fi genre into a much larger world of cinematic creativity. Of course we all know CGI has been used in a variety of film genres, but SFMZ being dedicated to sci-fi for the most part, we focused this list on the greatest CGI scenes in the sci-fi genre only.

SFMZ's Movie Aliens vs.
Pre-historic Real Beasts

The more popular movie sites such as TotalFilm.com and I09.com often feature sci-fi lists that are entertaining reads, and we even showcase a few of their lists here. TotalFilm.com featured the article "Movie Aliens vs. Real Animals." It is more of a humorous match-up and they even mix in some silliness with odd pairings for an amusing article.

Which is great for that avenue, but I wanted to see something a little more on the serious side, match-ups that were a bit more bad ass. So I decided to compile a part two of their article sans my dry humor and focus instead on match-ups that lean more towards the wicked factor.

Sci-Fi at the Box Office
By T.F. Powell

While Sci-Fi films seem to be shunned by the Oscars for the most part, the box office has been a bit more generous with praise, or at least monetarily. Since it's introduction in cinema history, the Sci-Fi genre has grossed close to 40 billion dollars, according to the-numbers.com.

This amount towers over the Horror genre, Westerns, and the Thriller/Suspense genre which have earned 15.5 billion, 1.99 billion, and 22.6 billion respectively. But Sci-Fi cowers in the shadows of Romantic Comedies earning 76 billion and the Action genre at 68.3 billion. The popularity of sci-fi film oscillates with highs and lows over the decades of cinema history.

The Greatest Sci-Fi Soundtracks

The soundtrack of a sci-film or television is arguably just as critical as the visual awe we experience from the greats such as 2001: A Spaced Odyssey, Blade Runner, Alien, Star Wars and many more. A dynamic score adds punch to a great sci-fi visual scene, without it, the scene's impact diminishes.

Before the age of soundtracks recorded on film, some silent movies were presented with live orchestras or pianists such as D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915).

We have gathered a crop of great sci-fi soundtracks here along with some audio clips and highlights of the sci-fi soundtrack composers.