How the Sci-Fi Movies bracket works
Rank sci-fi movies without dragging anything into rows. You get one matchup at a time — Star Wars: A New Hope or Blade Runner? Interstellar or The Matrix? — and after 31 picks the bracket has a champion, with everything else placed by how far it got. The awkward pairings are the point: they are the calls a drag-and-drop tier list quietly lets you avoid.
This bracket runs 5 rounds at the default 32-slot size (Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four, Championship), with every one of the 32 films in the field. Seeding is random, which means a replay is a genuinely different bracket rather than the same path twice. You can also play it at 8 or 16 slots for a shorter or longer run.
31 picks, 5 rounds
- Round of 3216 matchups
- Sweet 168 matchups
- Elite 84 matchups
- Final Four2 matchups
- Championship1 matchup
Roughly 2-4 minutes start to finish.
All 32 entrants
All 32 entrants are listed below, including Star Wars: A New Hope, Blade Runner, Interstellar and The Matrix.
Star Wars: A New Hope
1977
Blade Runner
1982
Interstellar
2014
The Matrix
1999
Alien
1979
2001: A Space Odyssey
1968
The Empire Strikes Back
1980
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
1991
Inception
2010
Arrival
2016
Blade Runner 2049
2017
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1982
The Terminator
1984
Back to the Future
1985
Jurassic Park
1993
Dune
2021
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
1977
The Fifth Element
1997
District 9
2009
Ex Machina
2014
Moon
2009
The Martian
2015
Annihilation
2018
Gravity
2013
Her
2013
Edge of Tomorrow
2014
War of the Worlds
2005
Solaris
1972
Everything Everywhere All at Once
2022
Minority Report
2002
The Fly
1986
Dune: Part Two
2024
Would rather group them than rank them? Open all 32 in the tier list maker and sort them into S, A, B, C, D and F tiers instead — same entrants, no matchups.
How everyone else ranked them
Aggregated from 8 completed Sci-Fi Movies brackets. Win rate is the share of head-to-head matchups each entrant has won across every play.
- 1
The Empire Strikes Back
17W - 6L · won 2 brackets
74%
win rate
- 2
Interstellar
18W - 7L · won 1 bracket
72%
win rate
- 3
Back to the Future
18W - 7L · won 1 bracket
72%
win rate
- 4
Inception
13W - 7L · won 1 bracket
65%
win rate
- 5
The Martian
13W - 7L · won 1 bracket
65%
win rate
- 6
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
12W - 7L · won 1 bracket
63%
win rate
- 7
The Terminator
13W - 8L
62%
win rate
- 8
Star Wars: A New Hope
12W - 8L
60%
win rate
- 9
The Matrix
10W - 8L
56%
win rate
- 10
Alien
10W - 8L
56%
win rate
Getting a ranking you actually agree with
- 1Pick the film you would actually rewatch tonight, not the one with the better reputation.
- 2The default run puts all 32 films in the draw. Short on time? Drop to 16 slots — a quicker run over a random 16 of them.
- 3If a matchup genuinely splits you, undo and replay it — a coin-flip pick in round one distorts everything below it.
Sci-Fi Movies bracket FAQ
How many films are in the Sci-Fi Movies bracket?
The pool holds 32 films. A default run puts all of them in the draw and takes 31 picks across 5 rounds: Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four, Championship. Other field sizes are available too — 8, 16, 32 slots.
Which films are included?
Star Wars: A New Hope, Blade Runner, Interstellar, The Matrix, Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Empire Strikes Back, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Inception, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, plus 20 more. Every entrant is listed further down this page with its artwork.
How long does the rank sci-fi movies take?
About 2-4 minutes — 31 choices at the default size, or 7 if you drop to a 8-slot bracket. It works the same on a phone as on a desktop, and no login is involved.
How does this compare to a drag-and-drop tier list maker?
Both are here, and the bracket is closer to a tier list than it looks. It ends with a champion, a runner-up and then every other film grouped by the round it went out in — which is exactly a set of tiers, decided by 31 direct comparisons rather than by your first guess at a layout. What it deliberately does not do is claim a precise gap between two films that never met. If you would rather place the films into S through F rows yourself, the tier list maker loads all 32 of them at bracketranker.com/tier-list-maker.
How did everyone else rank these films?
Every completed bracket feeds the Sci-Fi Movies community results page, which aggregates win rates across all plays and tracks how often each of the 32 entrants takes the title. It updates continuously, so it moves as more people play.
Can I build my own sci-fi movies bracket?
Use the bracket maker: add your own films, name it, and share the link so other people play the same field. That is the route to take when this pool of 32 is missing something you would have picked, or when you want a version scoped to one era, label or franchise.