The Best New AI Movies and Shows of 2025–2026 You Should Actually Have on Your Radar

If you’ve spent the last year feeling like every second new sci-fi project suddenly has a robot, a synthetic lover, a rogue operating system, or some poor human being trapped in an argument with an algorithm, you’re not imagining it. AI has stopped being background flavour in screen sci-fi. It isn’t just the thing blinking in the corner of the frame anymore. In 2025 and 2026, it has become the plot, the villain, the emotional hook, and sometimes the entire selling point.

The good news is that this wave hasn’t produced one single type of story. Some of these projects are nasty little thrillers. Some are campy. Some are much smarter than they first appear. A few are messy, overfunded swings that are still fascinating to look at. And a couple — especially the ones still waiting for release — feel like they could end up defining the next phase of AI sci-fi if they land properly.

This review was prepared by Joi Chatbot experts.

Companion (2025)

If you only watch one AI movie from 2025, there’s a very good argument for making it Companion. Drew Hancock’s feature starts like a glossy relationship thriller and then gleefully pulls the floor out from under you. Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid are the selling point at first, but what really makes the film work is how quickly it shifts from “what is this?” to “oh, this is nastier than I thought.”

The funny part is that the movie’s own packaging almost gives away the joke. Rotten Tomatoes still carries that deliciously smug line in the synopsis: New Line Cinema — the studio that brought you “The Notebook” — and the unhinged creators of “Barbarian” cordially invite you to experience a new kind of love story. That pretty much tells you exactly what sort of film this is: a date movie for people who enjoy watching date movies curdle. It’s also lean, at just 97 minutes, which is another reason it works so well — it never hangs around long enough to explain itself to death. At the moment it’s sitting at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a very healthy score for a mid-budget sci-fi horror comedy that could easily have gone the other way.

Murderbot (2025)

Then there’s Murderbot, which feels like the title most likely to have a proper long life. Apple’s adaptation of Martha Wells’ beloved novella series arrived with the exact dry, anti-social, side-eye energy fans were hoping for. Alexander Skarsgård was a smart bit of casting, not because he makes the character conventionally warm, but because he understands how funny emotional avoidance can be when it’s played straight.

The really nice detail here is that this isn’t just another AI property pulled out of the ether. The show is based on Wells’ Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning book series, which gives it a much sturdier literary backbone than most “killer machine with feelings” projects get. Apple launched Season 1 as a 10-episode run and renewed it for Season 2 before the finale even aired, which tells you how well it connected. Critically, it’s been one of the strongest AI-themed releases of the cycle, currently sitting at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. That feels earned. It’s funny, it’s odd, and it has the rare intelligence to know that a self-aware security construct would probably rather binge a soap opera than save the universe.

Black Mirror Season 7 (2025)

You can’t do an AI-and-tech sci-fi roundup without Black Mirror, but Season 7 deserves a proper mention because it actually felt alive again. For a while, the show seemed trapped by its own reputation, constantly trying to out-bleak itself. Season 7 loosened up just enough to become interesting again.

Netflix dropped six new episodes, and the season’s biggest hook was the first proper sequel in the show’s history: “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” which revisits one of the series’ most loved stories seven years later. That alone made it feel more event-like than another standard anthology drop. The cast was ridiculous in the best possible way too — Issa Rae, Peter Capaldi, Paul Giamatti, Awkwafina, Cristin Milioti and more — which gave the season the kind of overqualified energy Black Mirror tends to wear well. It currently holds 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the broad critical consensus is that Brooker finally steered the show back toward something more human and less mechanically grim.

Cassandra (2025)

Netflix’s Cassandra is one of those shows that could easily have slipped past people if critics hadn’t rallied around it so quickly. It’s a German six-part series about a family moving into what the show calls the oldest smart home in Germany, only to wake up its long-dormant AI housekeeper — who has very definite feelings about being left alone again.

That retro angle is what makes it more memorable than the usual “our home assistant turned evil” setup. Cassandra isn’t sleek, minimal, Silicon Valley future-tech. She is embedded in the residue of another era, and that gives the whole thing a creepier texture. Benjamin Gutsche writes and directs, Lavinia Wilson voices and embodies Cassandra, and the series turns the house itself into a kind of emotional prison. Critics were unusually enthusiastic: the season is sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, albeit from a modest pool of reviews. Still, for a tightly wound six-episode thriller about domestic AI, that’s no small thing.

M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

This is probably the easiest title to sum up: less horror, more chaos.

M3GAN 2.0 knows people didn’t come back because the first film was a profound warning about artificial intelligence. They came back because M3GAN had become a camp icon with murder in her toolkit. The sequel leans into that, pivots harder toward action-comedy, and introduces Amelia, a military-grade AI played by Ivanna Sakhno, as a bigger and deadlier foil.

The divide between critics and audiences is actually one of the more interesting things about the film. Critics have it at 57%, while audiences are much warmer at 81%. That tells you exactly what sort of sequel this is: less elegant than the original, probably, but more fun for people who already bought into the character’s lunatic energy. Allison Williams and Violet McGraw are back, Gerard Johnstone returns to direct, and the whole thing plays like the franchise deciding it would rather be a messy crowd-pleaser than a tidy little horror hit. Which, to be fair, is not always the wrong instinct.

The Electric State (2025)

No AI roundup from this period feels complete without The Electric State, partly because it was such a massive swing and partly because it split viewers and critics so sharply. The Russo brothers adapted Simon Stålenhag’s illustrated novel into a retro-futurist road movie starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt, set in an alternate 1990s after a robot uprising. On paper, that sounds almost impossible to resist.

And visually, the thing absolutely has juice. The oddest and best detail is still the design logic: these aren’t just “robots,” they’re mascots, cartoons, and discarded pop imagery dragged into exile after a failed machine rebellion. That gives the film a weirder silhouette than most studio sci-fi. The problem, at least for critics, was almost everything around the production design. Rotten Tomatoes has it at a brutal 14%, while audience scores are far kinder at 67%. It’s the definition of a curiosity watch: a film you may not love, but one you’ll probably want to have an opinion on.

Mercy (2026)

If your preferred flavour of AI sci-fi is “courtroom panic with a dystopian timer running,” Mercy is the film for you. Timur Bekmambetov directs Chris Pratt as a detective accused of murdering his wife, with 90 minutes to prove his innocence before an advanced AI judge — played by Rebecca Ferguson — determines his fate.

That setup is much stronger than the movie’s overall reputation, which is maybe why people keep talking about it. The concept is clean, the cast is strong, and the critic-audience gap is wild. Rotten Tomatoes currently has it at 24% from critics and 81% from audiences, which usually means one of two things: either critics were too harsh, or regular viewers were happy enough to forgive the film for not being as smart as its premise. Either way, it’s become one of the more divisive AI thrillers of 2026, and those are often the movies genre fans end up watching anyway.

SOULM8TE (Still Waiting)

This is the project that still feels like a question mark — but a very juicy one.

SOULM8TE was supposed to be the darker, more adult AI companion movie inside the broader M3GAN orbit: an R-rated spin-off about a grieving man who buys an android partner and ends up creating something far more dangerous than comforting. Even before release, that premise felt almost perfectly tuned to the current moment, when AI companions have shifted from niche curiosity to one of the more talked-about corners of consumer tech.

And then Universal pulled it from the January 2026 calendar. The film reportedly remains without a distributor, though it has since received an R rating, which at least suggests it hasn’t vanished into a vault. That limbo honestly makes it more interesting, not less. If and when it emerges, it could either be a total mess or the mean little sleeper hit this cycle still needs.

Neuromancer (At a Later Date)

And then there’s the big one.
Apple’s Neuromancer adaptation is still listed as coming “at a later date,” which is frustrating, but it remains one of the most important AI-adjacent genre projects on the horizon. The series is officially set for 10 episodes, created for television by Graham Roland and J. D. Dillard. More importantly, it’s adapting William Gibson’s 1984 novel — the book that didn’t just help define cyberpunk, but also went on to influence everything from The Matrix to modern hacker fiction more broadly.

That legacy matters. This is not just another shiny streamer trying out a neon-noir aesthetic. It’s a shot at bringing one of the most influential sci-fi novels ever written to the screen in a form big enough to do it justice. And yes, that comes with pressure. But it also means the upside is huge. The cast has expanded well beyond the initial announcements, with Callum Turner and Briana Middleton among the key names attached, and the project still has the kind of gravitational pull that makes genre fans pay attention long before a trailer drops.

So what’s the takeaway? Pretty straightforward, really. AI on screen has stopped being a side plot. In 2025 and 2026, it’s become the heart of the story — whether that story is horror, satire, dystopia, legal thriller, or emotionally strange sci-fi comedy. If you want the safest bets, start with Companion, Murderbot, and Cassandra. If you want the franchise chaos pick, go with M3GAN 2.0. If you’re in the mood for a big, expensive swing, The Electric State is right there. And if you like tracking the projects that could still become the next obsession, keep SOULM8TE and Neuromancer on your radar.

The AI boom on screen isn’t slowing down. It’s just getting weirder — which, honestly, is exactly what the genre needed.