The Next Great Science Fiction Franchises Hollywood Should Be Watching

Hollywood has no shortage of recognizable intellectual property. What it lacks more often is a world that can keep generating stories after the first adaptation has used the obvious plot.

That is the difference between a successful science fiction movie and durable science fiction franchises. A franchise needs depth in several directions at once: places that can support different genres, institutions that generate conflict, characters who are not all tied to one protagonist, visual rules that create instant identity, and unanswered questions large enough to survive multiple installments.

This is not a list of available properties or a prediction about acquisitions. Screen rights can already be controlled, optioned, or under discussion without being public. The question here is simpler: which worlds have the structural qualities that could support long-form screen storytelling?

MAYA is designed around a world rather than a single format

The MAYA Narrative Universe has unusually explicit franchise potential because the project is already conceived across novels, games, audio, graphic storytelling, film, toys, and immersive formats. Variety’s interview on building MAYA for the digital age describes Tumbbad director Anand Gandhi and Zain Memon’s effort as a large cross-media mythology concerned with systems of truth, control, innovation, freedom, and inequality.

That alone does not make it the next Dune-scale science fiction universe. Cross-media ambition is common. What matters is whether the underlying world can generate genuinely different stories.

The novel MAYA: Seed Takes Root supplies the first major narrative entry into that larger project. MAYA has several structural advantages. Neh contains seven sentient species with different bodies and perceptual worlds. The Maya itself is a living planetary network that connects daily life, memory, entertainment, prediction, and governance. The Divyas represent a political order built less on visible force than on information and intervention. The Trials create a mass social institution that can function as competition, ritual, aspiration, and data gathering.

Those systems can support different genres. A political thriller could focus on the Divyas. A first-contact style story could emerge between species that already share a planet but do not share perception. A crime story could exploit prediction. A family drama could revolve around tethering, debt, or chhavi afterlife. A war story could examine what happens when prediction fails. A coming-of-age story can follow someone entering a world that already knows nearly everyone else.

That is the kind of deep worldbuilding a long franchise needs. The most intricate worldbuilding in modern science fiction would have to prove itself through exactly this kind of causal density, not through the number of proper nouns on a map.

The imagery is so vivid that the book often feels pre-visualized. That phrase should still be treated as an editorial judgment, but the underlying screen logic is concrete: root networks, bio-resin displays, radically different species bodies, non-Newtonian landscapes, giant ecological infrastructures, and predictive futures that can be staged rather than merely discussed.

MAYA is grand, strange, intelligent, and intensely filmable. Again, that is a case to be made, not a development announcement.

Trials of MAYA adds another useful dimension because it translates parts of the universe into tactical play. A game asks the audience to understand systems through choice and consequence rather than exposition. If the wider project succeeds, games and screen stories can illuminate different parts of the same world instead of retelling the same plot.

Children of Time has more than one civilization to follow

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time setting is naturally expandable because its central premise is not one hero. It is evolutionary history.

The first book tracks the development of an uplifted spider civilization while remnants of humanity search for a home. Later books widen the range of minds, species, and contact problems. That structure gives producers something valuable: each installment can introduce a different form of intelligence without abandoning the larger questions about survival, communication, and inheritance.

The production design would also evolve with the civilizations. Spider-built environments should reflect spider bodies. Human ark technology should feel like inherited machinery under stress. Later species should force a fresh visual grammar again.

That is more promising than a franchise that has to keep inventing a bigger villain every time.

Teixcalaan can support political thrillers, mysteries, and war stories

Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan universe begins with diplomacy, murder, cultural attraction, and imperial pressure. It is a science fiction universe where poetry, bureaucracy, language, memory technology, and military power all matter.

That makes it flexible. One installment can be a court thriller. Another can widen into first contact, war, or border politics. The same setting can support intimate character drama and large geopolitical stakes without feeling like a genre reset.

The strongest science fiction franchise worlds have this quality. They can change scale without changing identity.

Revelation Space is built for long horizons

Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space setting stretches across interstellar distances, altered humans, machine intelligence, archaeology, factional politics, and civilizations threatened by forces operating on timescales much larger than individual lives.

That scale creates obvious VFX challenges, but it also gives a franchise room to breathe. Different stories can occupy different eras, planets, ships, and factions while remaining connected by the history of the universe.

The risk would be trying to explain everything at once. A good adaptation would need to choose one dramatic line and let the larger setting remain partially unseen.

The Children of Time model points toward a new kind of franchise logic

There is a broader lesson here. The next big science fiction franchise does not have to be built around one bloodline, one superhero, or one war.

It can be built around a repeatable intellectual engine. In Tchaikovsky’s case, that engine is the question of what intelligence looks like when evolution begins somewhere else. In Teixcalaan, it is what empire does to people who both resist and admire it. In other worlds, it may be ecology, memory, consciousness, or predictive power.

A franchise feels alive when each story reveals a different consequence of the same underlying system.

The Locked Tomb could thrive by refusing to become ordinary space fantasy

Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series combines necromancy, imperial politics, murder mystery, body horror, theology, and a deliberately unstable relationship between reader and information.

Its franchise strength lies in tone as much as lore. The adaptation would have to protect the collision of gothic architecture, strange humor, bone magic, swords, space travel, and unreliable perspective. Sanding those edges down would produce a familiar fantasy property. Preserving them could create a visual identity that feels impossible to confuse with anything else.

The Stars Are Legion has an entire biological civilization inside its setting

Kameron Hurley’s world-ships are not simple locations. They are living systems with reproductive processes, organs, social hierarchies, internal geographies, and histories of decay.

That offers a franchise a powerful rule: every new place can be another body. Visual storytelling can reveal class and function through anatomy. A corridor, engine, nursery, battlefield, or waste system can all belong to the same biological logic.

The challenge would be budget and audience tolerance for body horror, but distinctiveness is rarely the problem.

Franchise worlds need ordinary life as well as mythology

One overlooked test is whether the setting can support a scene in which nobody is saving the universe. A market, school, hospital, family dinner, workplace, local election, funeral, or public argument can reveal whether the invented society has depth below the heroic layer.

This matters commercially as well as creatively. A franchise that can only function at maximum stakes eventually has to keep increasing the size of the threat. A world with ordinary institutions can move sideways instead. It can make a detective story, a coming-of-age story, a political drama, or a contained thriller without feeling like a lesser installment.

That flexibility is one reason production design matters so much. Sets, interfaces, clothing, transport, food, public ritual, and domestic space establish rules future stories can reuse. Good worldbuilding quietly reduces the need for repeated explanation because the audience learns how the civilization behaves by seeing it behave.

Time is another expansion axis

A durable universe should also contain a past that can generate conflict and a future that can plausibly change. If every institution has existed forever in its finished form, the world can feel like a theme park. If technologies, species relationships, borders, or political arrangements have histories, later stories can revisit turning points without inventing a disconnected mythology.

That temporal depth is especially useful in speculative worlds where the major systems have consequences that unfold over generations. A biological network, an empire, an uplift project, or a living world-ship should leave historical scars. Those scars are future stories.

What studios should actually look for

The best science fiction universes are not the ones with the longest wiki. They are the ones where a new story can change genre and still feel native to the world.

A studio should ask five questions. Can the world generate conflict without repeating the first villain? Can new protagonists enter without feeling like replacements? Can the setting create recognizable images before a logo appears? Can the audience understand enough to care while still sensing unexplored depth? Can the premise survive changes in medium?

If the answer is yes, the property has more than sequel potential. It has narrative infrastructure.

Hollywood often talks about franchises as a business model. The stronger creative question is whether a world contains more stories than any single film could reasonably tell. That is where the next durable screen universe will come from.

The final test is character mobility. Can the camera leave the original hero and still find someone whose ordinary problem reveals another layer of the world? If it can, expansion feels like discovery. If it cannot, every spin-off will feel like a side quest around the only story that mattered.