Sci-Fi film competition
XPRIZE
📌 About the Event
The Future Vision XPRIZE is a massive $3.5 Million+ global sci-fi film competition designed to completely upend Hollywood’s obsession with bleak, dystopian futures. Backed by XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis, the Roddenberry Foundation, and prominent tech visionaries like Cathie Wood (ARK Invest) and Jed McCaleb (Vast), this initiative challenges filmmakers to build a new Star Trek blueprint for society.
The core mission is to portray technology especially artificial intelligence, robotics, and energy infrastructure not as an existential threat, but as the primary catalyst for an abundant, thriving humanity. The contest explicitly recognizes sci-fi storytelling as the ultimate “creative R&D” that inspires builders to turn cinematic concepts into trillion-dollar realities.
📅 Critical Phase Timeline
- Active Creation Phase: February – August 2026
- Hard Submission Deadline: August 15, 2026
- Expert Selection Review: August 2026
- The Live Finals: September 25, 2026
🚀 Creative Guidelines & “The Nuance of Tension”
The jury is searching for bold, visually ambitious narratives that show humanity flourishing, conquering climate issues, exploring space, or solving health crises. However, they explicitly note that optimism does not mean a boring, conflict-free utopia:
⚠️ A Crucial Note on Stakes: Great cinema requires friction, villains, and real human costs. The differentiation here is not the absence of darkness, but the presence of hope. Your characters can face intense danger and complex real-world systemic obstacles, but the underlying narrative arc must show that through struggle, courage, and technology, humanity ultimately figures it out.
💻 Mandatory Submission Deliverables
To pass the technical screening panel, creative teams must submit three specific assets:
- The Cinematic Trailer: A maximum 3-minute trailer demonstrating your visual world-building.
- The Treatment: A maximum 12-page script treatment outlining the broader narrative arc, world dynamics, and character paths.
- The Written Brief: A precise 2-page synopsis detailing your core concept.
🏆 The $3,500,000+ Prize & Production Matrix
The prize structure is designed to take a 3-minute concept and fund it directly into a mainstream feature film:
🥇 1st Place: Grand Prize Champion (1 Winner)
- 💰 Cash Allocation: $100,000 upfront cash for immediate screenplay development.
- 🎬 Production Financing: A massive $2.5 Million equity investment to fully produce the feature film, with Hollywood management firm Range Media Partners attached as producers.
- 📈 Fan-Investor Multiplier: A public crowd-investment campaign launched on Republic Film (leveraging its 3 million user network) to help the winner raise an additional $1M+ in production capital.
- 🚀 Career Launchpad: Guaranteed industry distribution connections and a full scholarship to attend the Moonshot Summit Finals in LA.
🥈 2nd Place: Finalist Runner-Up (1 Winner)
- 💰 Cash Allocation: $100,000 cash for script development.
- 🤝 Access & Visibility: Featured global promotions across XPRIZE networks and direct access to Google internal creative teams and Hollywood producers.
- ✈️ Travel: Full scholarship to the Moonshot Summit Finals in LA.
🥉 3rd Place: Honorable Mention (1 Winner)
- 💰 Cash Allocation: $10,000 cash prize sponsored by SandboxAQ.
- 📣 Exposure: Public film recognition and showcase placement across the official XPRIZE website and YouTube channels.