All 3 Brad Pitt Sci-Fi Movies, Ranked

2 weeks ago 15

Brad Pitt looking into the camera in a still from Ad Astra (2019)

Published Feb 12, 2026, 12:11 PM EST

Jeremy has more than 2300 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas.

To Brad Pitt’s credit, he’s not really associated with any single genre, and that is a sign of range. Or it can be a sign of range. It could also be a sign that an actor just isn't cut out to be an actor, if they really can’t manage to feel at home within a single type of movie, but if an actor is generally good at anything they take on, and they take on a range of stuff… yeah, that’s range. Glad we’ve got that sorted out. And that applies to Pitt, who was maybe most at home within the realm of thrillers and psychological dramas early in his career (see Fight Club, Se7en, and small roles in the likes of True Romance and Thelma & Louise), but he really branched out later on. His career trajectory was a little like fellow Interview with the Vampire star Tom Cruise’s, maybe, though Pitt has arguably found success in dramas and more “serious” films to a greater extent than Cruise, who peaked as a dramatic actor in 1999, with Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia, and then became more of an action star in the 21st century.

And Pitt can do action too, but for now, why not focus on his sci-fi roles? There aren’t many of them, but there are several, and they're interesting/varied, too. A couple that might fit within such bounds are not included here, though. Brad Pitt did have a small but memorable cameo in Deadpool 2, which is kind of a sci-fi film, but maybe not entirely. And it’s hard to assess Pitt’s role within it, since the joke is that it is Brad Pitt in a thankless/mostly unseen role, and you only see one of the most recognizable faces in modern-day cinema for about a second or two. Also, there’s Megamind, which is an animated movie, and also not an entirely sci-fi-focused one, so it’s not being included here. It’s hard to assess a voice-only performance against full-on live-action ones. But those aside, what follows is a rundown of Pitt’s sci-fi flicks, ranked as best you can when you’ve only got a few to choose from. And, uh, starting with one that’s okay, and ending with one that’s pretty great.

3 'World War Z' (2013)

Brad Pitt as Gerry Lane standing in traffic looking confused in World War Z.

Decades after George A. Romero defined and then pretty much perfected what a zombie movie was, or could be, World War Z came along and tried to argue that a zombie movie could also be a blockbuster, a grounded sci-fi film, an action movie, and a horror film, all at once, and the results were mixed. This is a messy and somewhat frustrating movie, even if it’s not entirely bad. Zombies were especially big back in the 2010s, and for much of the 2000s, too, thanks partly to 28 Days Later, and then The Walking Dead hadn’t, you know, died yet, at this point, so people liked zombies. A massive zombie movie was inevitable. And World War Z was a popular book released during the whole zombie craze, but it was always going to be a difficult one to adapt into a movie without making some serious changes, or streamlining things, or just cutting out a large amount of the text itself, because World War Z (the novel) is sprawling in a way that would be hard to capture in a miniseries, let alone a single movie. The book really emphasizes the “world” part of things, looking at how big things change after a zombie outbreak in a relatively grounded way (as grounded as possible), and with many different perspectives of the whole ordeal.

World War Z has a committed enough Brad Pitt performance at its center, who does his best with what he’s given.

The film, though, is mostly just about one guy, but he does see a lot, and the stakes are still high because the outbreak is massive, plus he’s got a family to protect and stuff. Maybe things are a bit too big, because zombies become a little less scary when they're in a huge movie that has to appeal to viewers of most ages (which means the bloodshed is minimal), but then you lose something by not having the entire story feel as global or expansive as it does in the source material. World War Z has a committed enough Brad Pitt performance at its center, who does his best with what he’s given, and there are still moments of spectacle here that make certain stretches of the film entertaining. Also, there’s a novelty in seeing a zombie movie that costs this much money, and there might not be such an expensive one ever again. That could be for the best, but at least they tried. World War Z (2013) is evidence that someone tried.

Not the only star-studded movie Brad Pitt was featured in from 2019 (oh hi, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Ad Astra was an unusual sort of science fiction movie, but an underrated one, too. It was going for something a little stranger and slower than most sci-fi films of its scale, proving similarly spectacular to other films set in space from the 2010s, like Interstellar and Gravity. The energy it was putting out was different, though, and maybe made it a bit less approachable. On the surface, though, this is a movie about someone having to travel deep into space to find out the truth behind a mission that went wrong many years earlier. To say the whole expedition is an unusual one would be an understatement, especially when you have something that feels like a car chase, except on the surface of the moon, and a sequence that involves rabid baboons. Deadly baboons in space. Which sounds like a joke. But no, it really happens.

And it kind of works, if you just go with it. Ad Astra is incredibly serious for much of its runtime, and maybe even a tad downbeat, but then when it goes wild with some set pieces, you kind of have to admire that. It’s not interested in doing what’s expected, even if you might be able to see certain things coming, and even if you can point to certain moments or visuals being reminiscent of those found in other ambitious and technically dazzling sci-fi movies. There’s a risk involved with watching a movie like this, because you might not like what you get, and so too was there risk involved in making it, because Ad Astra didn’t really find an audience, and it’s kind of been forgotten about just a few years on from its release. But it’s a better Brad Pitt sci-fi movie than World War Z, at the very least, and is admittedly more of a science fiction movie than that one, which some might not even consider to be worthy of being counted here, as a work of science fiction, but oh well. You can’t really rank just two movies. But either way, the #1 pick would have to be…

1 'Twelve Monkeys' (1995)

Bruce Willis as James Cole and Brad Pitt as Jeffrey Goines in a hospital in 12 Monkeys

…Twelve Monkeys. No baboons this time. It has the word “Monkeys” in the title, sure, but literal monkeys aren’t the focus here. Instead, it’s a film initially set in 2035 about a prisoner played by Bruce Willis going back in time to try and discover the origins of a deadly virus that’s essentially wiped out most of the population, but the time travel goes wrong. He ends up going too far back, to 1990, rather than 1996, and then he ends up basically made a prisoner again, though this time in a psychiatric facility. Still, there are avenues there toward finding out what he was sent back for, but it’s all a whole lot more complicated, naturally. It’s a Terry Gilliam movie, so of course it’s going to get strange, but he’s a bit more restrained here than usual, with Twelve Monkeys being perhaps his most easily approachable film (unless you count Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which Gilliam co-directed, and which is also kind of hard to resist).

On the Brad Pitt side of things, this was one of the first times he really stole the show with a supporting performance, rather than a small one where he was just there for a scene or two. He plays a patient at the aforementioned psychiatric facility who ends up having some possible ties to the group who are set to release the virus, but he’s also eccentric and unstable enough that he’s not the easiest person to work with. Pitt’s great with the kind of unbalanced character he has to play, bringing a lot of energy to the role and, by extension, the entire film, making it ultimately not too surprising that it earned him his first Oscar nomination. The whole movie is pretty thrilling and the right level of strange and disorientating; just enough, but not overwhelmingly so, to the point where you completely lose track of things and disconnect from everything going on. Twelve Monkeys is well-controlled chaos, to put it another way, and certainly one of the best time travel movies of the last few decades (though if you're talking Bruce Willis time travel movies specifically, it’s got some tough competition, thanks to 2012’s Looper).