Ryan Gosling's Project Hail Mary has landed among the ten biggest sci-fi earners of the past decade, according to a fresh genre box office roundup that also features Dune, the Transformers franchise and China's Wandering Earth films.

The 2026 release is based on Andy Weir's novel of the same name, the author who also wrote The Martian. Gosling plays astronaut Ryland Grace, sent alone into deep space to keep Earth from collapsing, and puppeteer James Ortiz voices Rocky, the alien he ends up depending on. Reception has been warm, and the film's commercial run this year has been strong enough to crack a decade-spanning ranking dominated by franchise names.

That company includes some unlikely survivors. Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth and final entry in Michael Bay's run with the franchise, pulled in $605.4 million worldwide back in 2017 despite being widely considered the weakest of Bay's five films. It's the lowest-grossing Bay-directed Transformers movie and still one of the decade's biggest sci-fi hits, which tells you something about how much cushion this genre has at the box office even when the reviews turn ugly.

China's Wandering Earth franchise gets a mention too, and deservedly. The 2019 original became the seventh highest-grossing non-English-language film ever made, built around a plot where the entire planet works together to survive a runaway sun. Its 2023 sequel, Wandering Earth II, kept that theme going and found an audience well beyond China, part of a broader pattern where international sci-fi has started punching through in markets that usually only show up for Hollywood tentpoles.

The MonsterVerse gets two entries of its own. Kong: Skull Island, set in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, built out the mythology that eventually let Godzilla and Kong share a screen, and the crossover sequel Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire leaned further into spectacle over plot and did fine business doing it. Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One, riding both his name and built-in gamer nostalgia, rounds out the group from 2018.

Dune: Part Two also features in the accounting, though the roundup that flagged all this was cut off before naming its exact figures. What's clear is that the genre's commercial center of gravity keeps shifting between legacy franchises and one-off adaptations that catch on, and Project Hail Mary's numbers this year suggest original-ish sci-fi still has room to break through when the source material and the casting line up. Whether it holds its spot as more 2026 releases report final grosses is the next thing worth watching.