You may have noticed that Hulu’s primary sci-fi franchises revolve around three signature films from 20th Century Studios: Alien, Predator, and Planet of the Apes. Ordinarily, we would try to avoid using two films from the same franchise when picking the three sci-fi movies on Hulu that you need to watch in any given month. But for November, we had to go with two Alien movies, because the older one is a true classic that’s back on Hulu after an extended absence, while the other is a hit from summer 2024 that’s making its streaming debut this week.
To change things up, our non-Alien pick of the month is a sci-fi comedy from writer and director Mike Judge of Beavis and Butt-head and Office Space fame.
Need more recommendations? Then check out the best new movies to stream this week, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
Aliens (1986)
Surprisingly, Aliens has spent a good deal of time on Max before making its way back to Hulu earlier this month. This movie may be nearly four decades old, but it’s still one of the best sci-fi action flicks of all time. Aliens also has the distinction of being James Cameron‘s follow-up to The Terminator, and he ups the scale accordingly.
Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the only survivor from the events of Alien, returns to Earth decades after she left. And despite losing so many years of her life to suspended animation, Ripley agrees to accompany the Colonial Marines on a mission to a colony world called LV-426 to verify her story about the Xenomorph aliens. What Ripley and the marines discover is that the colony has already been overrun by aliens, and their only means of escape may already be compromised.
Watch Aliens on Hulu.
Idiocracy (2006)
Imagine if the government was overtaken by the world’s dumbest people, who subsequently ran the country into the ground. But perhaps the real sci-fi touch of Idiocracy is that this happens hundreds of years in the future, thanks to a cryogenics test gone wrong. Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) and a prostitute named Rita (Saturday Night Live vet Maya Rudolph) were exceedingly average in the present. But 500 years from now, they’re the smartest people alive compared to everyone else.
Joe’s now relatively high intellect is the only thing that saves him from imprisonment. However, President Camacho (Terry Crews) has given Joe only a week to solve the country’s most pressing issues. And if Joe fails, the penalty is death.
Watch Idiocracy on Hulu.
Alien: Romulus (2024)
The most recent Alien movie, Alien: Romulus, has a very distinct horror vibe that harks back to the original 1979 film by Ridley Scott. Romulus‘ story takes place in the decades before Aliens, and it follows Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her group of friends, all of whom have essentially been trapped as indentured workers out in space.
In order to escape from their dead-end lives, Rain, her adoptive android brother, Andy (David Johnsson), Kay Harrison (Isabela Merced), and the rest of their group embark on a risky plan to salvage material from a space station called Romulus. Naturally, they discover a whole lot of facehuggers waiting for them. And where the facehuggers go, the Xenomorphs are never far behind.
Watch Alien: Romulus on Hulu on November 21.
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