11 Space Operas That Need A Movie Right Now

There’s a wealth of science fiction out there, just waiting for some movie studio to pick it up and do something with it.

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 7 seconds ago

With Hollywood’s box office numbers fading, there’s never been a better time to take a big risk on good ideas. There’s a wealth of science fiction out there, just waiting for some movie studio to pick it up and do something with it.

No more waiting. Drop that Back to the Future remake, Hollywood, and do something with these already brilliant sci-fi properties instead. I’ve ranked them in order, by which is most likely to be a huge, huge hit.

11. Farscape: The Movie

Farscape was critically acclaimed from day one, but it’s so linear and deeply character-driven that missing even a single episode in the days before streaming left you adrift without a paddle. A movie presents an opportunity to solve that.

Instead of one story stretched out over several seasons, we have the chance to get a complete story in a single, epic film. And if you thought Farscape’s visuals were impressive on a basic cable television budget, just imagine what the geniuses at the Jim Henson workshop could do with a $30 million budget.

If there’s a problem, it’s that it has since been totally ripped off by Guardians of the Galaxy, but I think there’s still enough here to make Farscape feel like its own thing. I’m just not sure I want to see it without the original cast, and given their age, there’s probably no way to do it with them. So that’s why it’s on the bottom of this list.

The Pitch: It’s the story of modern-day astronaut John Crichton, flung through a wormhole into a distant galaxy. There, he’s stuck on a living ship with a group of escaped prisoners who, though at first his enemies, become his allies, and eventually his friends. It’s the classic tale of a stranger in a strange land, mixed with piracy and full of deeply rooted character drama. It’s romantic too, full of realistic relationships against a fantastic backdrop.

10. Starship Troopers

Didn’t they already make this movie? Not really. There was a 1990s movie called Starship Troopers, which claimed to be an adaptation of the famous Robert A. Heinlein novel of the same name, but that film has so little in common with the novel that it’s not the same thing.

Heinlein’s version of this story has never been done at all and would feel totally original, unlike anything else audiences have ever seen in theaters. You’d probably just have to call it something else.

The Pitch: A hard science fiction movie about the difficulties of war in outer space, trapped in a battle for survival. The soldiers use power armor, which means you’d end up with a more serious take on the classic mech-suit trope in sci-fi. Somehow, we’ve also never gotten a good live-action mobile mech suit movie, and Heinlein invented the idea. It’s the best place to start.

9. The Futurama Movie

Turning in a movie worked for The Simpsons and they ran out of jokes fifteen years ago. Futurama, on the other hand, thanks to frequent network cancellations, still feels young. Matt Groening’s other animated masterpiece has never gotten a fair shake, but with its spacey setting and tendency towards blaster fire, it’s far more suited to the big screen than Springfield’s favorite family. It’s an animation, yes, but an animation for adults. Feel free to take things up a notch for the theatrical version, hook Bender up with a three-nippled robot hooker, and slap it with an “R” rating. Or if you’re really feeling spendy, ditch the animation and give us a live-action version.

The Pitch: A pizza delivery boy is accidentally frozen for a thousand years and wakes up in the future. There, he finds employment at the interplanetary delivery company Planet Express and struggles to fit in with its strange assortment of employees. His best friend is an alcoholic robot, he’s in love with a smoking hot kung-fu Cyclops who finds him repulsive, and he’s employed by a mad scientist with an increasingly bad case of dementia. Hilarity ensues. Think Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy meets Encino Man.

8. The Expanse: The Movie

The Expanse was the best science fiction series of the modern era. It’s based on a series of critically acclaimed books. The stories keep getting bigger as it goes on, and The Expanse is from jump a dense narrative examining complicated human politics and dynamics in a far-off future where man has begun traveling to the stars.

Despite its futuristic setting, the show and the books are propelled by their realism.  The Expanse gets all the little details about both science and human nature right. When you delve into this world, it feels exactly like what humanity colonizing outer space would really be like.

The Pitch: As impressive as The Expanse has been as a TV series, I’d love to see what it might look like on the big screen. Each book in the series, while continuing a linear narrative with the same group of characters, can also stand on its own. 

The best move for The Expanse is to simply make a parallel production. There’s really no way to make a sequel to the series, and I think there’s room for another take on it. Fans of the show would still be more connected to it because of their history with the franchise, but newcomers would be able to jump in for the movie if it’s done right.  

7. Battlestar Galactica: The Movie

There have been frequent talks about Battlestar Galactica getting the movie treatment. One problem: Most of those talks have been about making a movie out of the wrong version. When the fantastic, award-winning, Ronald Moore reboot of the classic franchise went off the air, Hollywood immediately cast it aside and rehired the creator of the less successful 80s version to start the whole thing all over again. Don’t do that. There’s a better way.

The Pitch: This movie should be a Battlestar Galactica prequel set in the Ron Moore version of the series. The story you need to tell already exists, in an underfunded web series called Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome. Turn that into a movie, and expect to print money.

6. Stargate: Lost In Space

Stargate started out as a movie, way back in 1994.  But it was after that movie ended that Stargate became a franchise, thanks to the television series, which took the movie’s premise and ran with it in a completely different direction.  The series is now getting a new installment on Amazon, and if it works, it’s time for another movie.

This time, the fans of the television franchise deserve a feature film set in that version of the Stargate universe. It shouldn’t use the same actors, they’ve grown too old for that. I don’t think we need a reboot either.

I’d position this movie as a sequel to the 1994 film, but skew its style and script to better align with the television series.  Better still, the sequel could easily follow a course similar to the one charted by Stargate Universe, before it was cancelled after only two seasons.

The Pitch: Let’s reboot Stargate Universe, while keeping everything else in canon. It can work. Decades after the discovery of a stargate that allows humans instantaneous travel to other planets, a breakthrough happens. While exploring the universe via the gates, a group of humans stumbles on an ancient alien starship traveling the galaxy.

When they board the ship, our heroes are stranded there and must use the alien vessel to try to find their way home. Lost in a hostile galaxy full of strange dangers and incredible creatures, they discover the key not only to existence, but also to themselves.

5. The Mote In God’s Eye

It’s one of the greatest science fiction books ever written, and perhaps also one of the most overlooked. Written in through a collaboration between Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and first published in 1974, this two-book duology charts the first contact between humanity and an alien race.

I know what you’re thinking, we’ve seen this before. No, you haven’t, not like this. Sure, much like Alien, this first contact doesn’t take place until far off in man’s future, when we’ve already explored most of space. But any similarities end there. What really sets this apart is the complex, utterly realistic, detailed way in which Niven and Pournelle develop the alien race, known as the Moties, which humanity encounters out there in that far-off place.

The Pitch: Popular science fiction often portrays aliens as either monsters or nearly human. Rarely is there a middle ground. Avatar’s Na’vi, for instance, are barely alien at all. They’re more like some blue African tribe.

Mote presents an intelligent alien species that is truly alien, not just in appearance but in the way they think, and then uses them as part of a gripping tale which asks this simple question: How can we possibly trust something so alien, let alone understand it? Maybe they lack the sex appeal of blue cat people (you’re unlikely to be aroused by a Mote’s gripping hand), but the story’s brilliantly written characters and massive, epic scope could turn the science fiction genre on its head if it ever made it up on screen.

4. Babylon 5: The Movie

With all due respect to Star Trek, Babylon 5 (at least for the first four seasons), may have been the greatest science fiction series in the history of television. At least, it was one of the most revolutionary. It was the first television show, for instance, to use computer-generated effects on whole sequences. The show’s plot plays out as a single complicated, linear story arc of the type now used by Lost and every other show currently on television, but unheard of back in the early 90s.

It told a complete story wrapped in a single series. Most importantly, though, it’s character-driven, epic, and utterly compelling. Many of the show’s cast members have sadly passed away. So if you do this, Hollywood, it’ll need to be a total reboot.

The Pitch: The show began every week with a monologue that, much better than I ever could, tells you all you need to know. Here’s how Babylon 5 described itself in Season 2: “ The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace. A self-contained world five miles long, located in neutral territory. A place of commerce and diplomacy for a quarter of a million humans and aliens. A shining beacon in space . . . all alone in the night. It was the dawn of the Third Age of Mankind – the year the Great War came upon us all. This is the story of the last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2259. The place is called Babylon 5.”

3. The Hyperion Cantos

There have actually been rumors that Dan Simmons masterful far-future series of novels (collectively referred to as the Hyperion Cantos) may be turned into a movie, but it hasn’t happened yet, and we’re tired of waiting. The material is challenging and heady, but also utterly unique. It starts out as a group of pilgrims journeying to a far-off planet called Hyperion, where they’ll visit the legendary Time Tombs. The tombs are guarded by the Shrike, an unstoppable, unknowable, spikey, metallic creature that snatches up travelers and impales them on its tree of thorns.

The Pitch: Hyperion tells the story of the pilgrims as they travel, and as the story spans multiple books it goes beyond them. It works brilliantly because it’s character-driven, scratch that, it’s more than character-driven, it’s emotion-driven.

Simmons puts his characters through hell and takes us with them through every step of suffering, sadness, and pain, which gradually comes together to form a larger picture. Hyperion is a story with something to say about the human condition, and it does it in an epic, potentially visually stunning package. It’s science fiction’s Lord of the Rings, and done right, it’ll win just as many Oscars.

2. Legend Of The Galactic Heroes

Legend of the Galactic Heroes began as a 10-novel series by Japanese author Yoshiki Tanaka and went on to become one of the most influential and longest-running space operas in Japanese history. It’s been adapted into an animation several times, but the most recent version is fully titled as Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These.

It tells the story of competing Galactic empires through the lens of two strategic geniuses, one in each nation, as they each rise through the military ranks, buoyed by their achievements.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes is a complex mix of eye-popping large-scale space battles, political maneuvering, and personal relationships told over a series of decades. It’s one of the biggest stories ever told, so big it’s hard to imagine it being told in any form other than anime.

The Pitch: Combine Star Wars with Game of Thrones, and you’re starting to get the picture. This could easily span multiple movies and become the biggest thing since George Lucas. There are no bigger ideas in space opera.

1. The Orville: The Motion Picture

As the show progressed, Seth MacFarlane’s Star Trek homage became increasingly cinematic.  The Orville’s focus on delivering a cinema-quality product for television has become so intense that the third season took nearly two years to complete.  If they’re going to all this trouble to make The Orville look and feel like a movie, they might as well actually make one and release it in theaters. 

I feel like there’s a good chance this might actually happen. Season 3 aired in 2025, and there’s been no movement on making season 4, despite heavy interest from fans. Now might be the perfect time to bring The Orville to the big screen, and Seth MacFarlane has all the Hollywood energy he needs to get it done.

The Pitch: The ideal path here is to simply deliver a normal Orville adventure on a movie scale.  They’ve already had a massive battle on the show, so I wouldn’t necessarily go that route.

The Orville Movie should be about raising the stakes for the characters, not necessarily about bigger special effects or more galactic consequences. If they’re smart, they’ll pattern The Orville movie after Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with some sort of existential threat that questions the very nature of their existence and demands a difficult sacrifice. Since it’s The Orville, they’ll also be able to take that concept and make it less boring, with weird, humorous quips and snappy crew banter.