2026’s Two Biggest Sci-Fi Movies Accidentally Parody Each Other

Published Oct 23, 2026, 11:45 AM EDT

Zoë Miskelly is an editor and second in command for Screen Rant's Movies team, having covered the entertainment industry for almost 10 years now. Zoë's love of superheroes and all things Marvel & DC started out in childhood, and has blossomed into a career getting to talk about some of the biggest and best movies and shows of all time, having previously focused on comics while working at WhatCulture.

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2026's two biggest sci-fi movies accidentally parody each other with the way they flesh out some of their respective characters, making the simultaneous success of these films during the year all the more interesting. Sci-fi has had a fiscally lucrative few years in recent history, with the likes of Avatar: Fire and Ash, Jurassic World: Rebirth and Dune: Part Two having released and garnered hundreds of millions between now and 2024 alone.

Every year has had some major sci-fi success stories, which have run the full range of tones between more intense and adult releases like Hope and Backrooms, to more overall family-friendly aimed sci-fi series, like Star Wars or Despicable Me, ensuring that every possible audience has some tale of alien creatures or time travel to intrigue them.

As it stands, 2026 has been no stranger to sci-fi stories that have resonated with audiences, since plenty of 2026's biggest box office hits have been sci-fi or sci-fi-leaning movies. Though 2026's two highest-grossing films from sci-fi franchises are stories that generally contrast each other, it's interesting to note they do affectionately parody each other in one notable way, thanks to their casts and how they're fleshed out.

2026's Two Biggest Sci-Fi Movies Inadvertently Parody The Other

2026's two highest-grossing sci-fi movies are that of Project Hail Mary and Minions & Monsters, which are two very different films in a lot of ways. One is a spacefaring live-action movie about two heroes saving their planets and arguably the universe, and the other is an animated story about the history of the titular Minions creatures decades before a different roster would become Despicable Me series protagonist Gru's super scientist posse.

Interestingly enough, despite being very different in most regards, the two films do replicate each other in one fascinating way, as their approaches to the non-human characters who become a core part of the story inadvertently parody one another.

For Project Hail Mary, the Eridian rock-like creature Rocky's kindness and intelligence are intentionally a subversion of the tropes around dangerous and deadly aliens and non-human creatures in these kinds of stories. Grace and Rocky's bond and how it develops is the highlight of the whole film, and gently pokes fun at many of the tropes associated with characters similar to Rocky in other narratives.

On the other hand, Minions & Monsters has its own non-human entity in the form of Goomi - or, rather, Gary Orkam Oliver Magma Ichabod the Deceiver. Inversely, Goomi's story affectionately pokes fun at the story trend of having initially ominous-seeming figures be loyal allies for a movie's protagonists via Goomi's interactions with the Minions, which make his real more sinister plans relatively transparent, though the well-meaning Minions aren't necessarily quick to catch on.

Project Hail Mary And Minions & Monsters Show How Movies Can Explore Similar Concepts In Very Different Ways

In effect, Project Hail Mary's Rocky and Minions & Monsters' Goomi do exist as similar characters who serve similar purposes in their respective narratives.

This is both by giving the central characters someone to bounce off and interact with, and giving them a foil to their own nature, with Rocky being a perfect opposite of sorts to Grace in most senses, and Goomi being more villainous and manipulative compared to the generally more oblivious if not downright naive Minions.

Despite this, the two 2026 movie characters end up as entirely different figures who you'd be hard-pressed to mistake for one another, and who clearly interested audiences in their own ways given the box office results of both sci-fi films, proving further how movies can explore mirroring concepts to their own success by taking very different routes with them.