A giant sandworm erupting through a Fortnite map sounds exactly like the sort of thing that shouldn't work. And yet here we are. Players can now summon Shai-Hulud using a Thumper, wield Dune-inspired weaponry, and unlock themed rewards as Dune: Awakening makes its way into Fortnite through creator-made experiences.

Dave Filoni has never courted the spotlight. The man who created Ahsoka Tano, breathed narrative coherence into The Clone Wars, and quietly became the most trusted creative steward in modern Star Wars mythology preferred, for most of his career, to be the person who makes the presidents look good. Now he is the president.

The chairs are out. The drinks are ready. Somewhere beyond the garden fence, a starship is about to make a very bad landing. An outdoor sci-fi night sounds wonderfully straightforward: carry out a projector, hang a screen and press play. The disappointing version begins when the sky is still bright, the picture is enormous but barely visible, and the battery warning arrives before the final act.

On 5 November 2026, Audible will release a scripted audio drama with the credentials of a major screen production. Exoplanet, executive produced by Andy Weir, written by Benjamin Percy and starring Anthony Mackie, Ariana DeBose and John Leguizamo, represents an ambitious bet on space sci-fi without a screen.

Disney has spent $226.5 million on Star Wars: Starfighter before a single frame of visual effects has been finalised. The figure, disclosed in UK production filings for the Pinewood Studios shoot, represents a gross spend recorded through 31 January 2026 — and it already eclipses the production costs Star Wars: The Force Awakens had accumulated at the same stage of its cycle.

What does it mean to adapt a novel that invented an entire genre — a book so dense with neologisms, so structurally unconventional, so fundamentally concerned with the dissolution of physical reality that four decades of Hollywood development have collectively failed to bring it to screen? On 22 January 2027, Apple TV will attempt an answer. Neuromancer, the ten-episode adaptation of William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk cornerstone, premieres with a two-episode debut followed by weekly releases through 19 March 2027.

What if the most significant space sci-fi film of 2026 arrived in cinemas and you almost missed it — and now, that it is out on streaming, you have a second chance to fix that mistake? That is the precise situation with Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg's alien conspiracy thriller, which landed on Peacock in the United States and on digital platforms globally from, 9 October.

A starship on the bookcase. A familiar droid beside the monitor. A small, suspiciously well-armed robot that arrived as a box of plastic parts. The pleasure of a sci-fi collectible is not necessarily its rarity, price or size. It is the connection it creates: to a character, an imagined future or the memory of discovering a fictional universe for the first time.