Movies Like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
If you loved E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial's Science Fiction and Adventure storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks
Flight of the Navigator
12-year-old David is accidentally knocked out in the forest near his home, but when he awakens eight years have passed. His family is overjoyed to have him back, but is just as perplexed as he is that he hasn't aged. When a NASA scientist discovers a UFO nearby, David gets the chance to unravel the mystery and recover the life he lost.
Jules
A flying saucer lands in the backyard of an elderly suburbanite with memory problems, who forms a bond with the scared alien inside.
Avatar: The Way of Water
Set more than a decade after the events of the first film, learn the story of the Sully family (Jake, Neytiri, and their kids), the trouble that follows them, the lengths they go to keep each other safe, the battles they fight to stay alive, and the tragedies they endure.
Solaris
A troubled psychologist is sent to investigate the crew of an isolated research station orbiting a bizarre planet.
Lilo & Stitch
The wildly funny and touching story of a lonely Hawaiian girl and the fugitive alien who helps to mend her broken family.
Planet 51
When Earth astronaut Capt. Chuck Baker arrives on Planet 51 -- a world reminiscent of American suburbia circa 1950 -- he tries to avoid capture, recover his spaceship and make it home safely, all with the help of an empathetic little green being.
Starman
When an alien takes the form of a young widow's husband and asks her to drive him from Wisconsin to Arizona, the government tries to stop them.
Earth to Echo
After a construction project begins digging in their neighbourhood, best friends Tuck, Munch and Alex inexplicably begin to receive strange, encoded messages on their cell phones. Convinced something bigger is going on, they go to their parents and the authorities. The three embark on a secret adventure to crack the code and follow it to its source, and discover a mysterious being from another world who desperately needs their help. The journey that follows will change all their lives forever.
More Movies Like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Arrival
Taking place after alien crafts land around the world, an expert linguist is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat.
Home
When Earth is taken over by the overly-confident Boov, an alien race in search of a new place to call home, all humans are promptly relocated, while all Boov get busy reorganizing the planet. But when one resourceful girl, Tip, manages to avoid capture, she finds herself the accidental accomplice of a banished Boov named Oh. The two fugitives realize there’s a lot more at stake than intergalactic relations as they embark on the road trip of a lifetime.
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
A surprise visit from Spock's father provides a startling revelation: McCoy is harboring Spock's living essence.
Signs
A family living on a farm finds mysterious crop circles in their fields which suggests something more frightening to come.
Guardians of the Galaxy
Light years from Earth, 26 years after being abducted, Peter Quill finds himself the prime target of a manhunt after discovering an orb wanted by Ronan the Accuser.
Ad Astra
The near future, a time when both hope and hardships drive humanity to look to the stars and beyond. While a mysterious phenomenon menaces to destroy life on planet Earth, astronaut Roy McBride undertakes a mission across the immensity of space and its many perils to uncover the truth about a lost expedition that decades before boldly faced emptiness and silence in search of the unknown.
Explorers
Middle schooler Ben spends his free time watching sci-fi films, playing video games and reading comic books. Surprisingly, his affinity for all things fantastical yields a real result – when he has a vivid dream about technology, his prodigy best friend Wolfgang manages to create a working spacecraft. Joined by their buddy Darren, the boys take off into outer space and encounter some very odd extraterrestrial life.
Star Trek: Generations
Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D find themselves at odds with the renegade scientist Soran who is destroying entire star systems. Only one man can help Picard stop Soran's scheme...and he's been dead for seventy-eight years.
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Adventurer/surgeon/rock musician Buckaroo Banzai and his band of men, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, take on evil alien invaders from the 8th dimension.
Star Trek Into Darkness
When the crew of the Enterprise is called back home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within their own organization has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis. With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction. As our heroes are propelled into an epic chess game of life and death, love will be challenged, friendships will be torn apart, and sacrifices must be made for the only family Kirk has left: his crew.
The In Between
After surviving a car accident that took the life of her boyfriend, a teenage girl believes he's attempting to reconnect with her from the after world.
WALL·E
After hundreds of years doing what he was built for, WALL•E— a robot designed to clean up the earth—discovers a new purpose in life when he meets a sleek search robot named EVE. EVE comes to realize that WALL•E has inadvertently stumbled upon the key to the planet's future, and races back to space to report to the humans. Meanwhile, WALL•E chases EVE across the galaxy and sets into motion one of the most imaginative adventures ever brought to the big screen.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982): Science Fiction and Adventure themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
See full details for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)