XPRIZE Offers $3.5 Million to Filmmakers Imagining a Better Future

The Future Vision XPRIZE is challenging filmmakers to move beyond science fiction’s fixation on dystopia and create compelling visions of a future humanity might actually want to build.

The global competition received more than 2,500 submissions, each consisting of a trailer of up to three minutes and a treatment for an original science-fiction film. Entries were asked to depict technology addressing meaningful problems, humanity flourishing, and characters overcoming genuine conflict without abandoning an underlying sense of hope.

Five finalists will present their projects in Los Angeles on September 25 before judges including Neil deGrasse Tyson, author Neal Stephenson, technology ethics leader Mira Lane, and Roddenberry Entertainment CEO Rod Roddenberry.

The competition offers more than $3.5 million in rewards. Its grand-prize package combines $100,000 for screenplay development with a $2.5 million equity investment to produce the winning feature. A separate $100,000 Audience Choice Award will be divided among five projects selected through public voting.

For example, one particularly interesting submission is Zero One Creative’s Fermi Explorer. Set in a prosperous but stagnant distant civilization, the trailer follows a scientist attempting to preserve an 80,000-year-old spacecraft carrying messages that could restart humanity’s expansion toward the stars.

Zero One Creative, also known as 01C, is a London-based creative technology studio founded by Ashkan Dabbagh, James Elkin, and Rupert Aspden. Established in 2023, the company combines experience in film, VFX, and immersive media to develop new production tools and stories. The team is collaborating with Fermi Explorer and Starcloud to expand the concept into a wider franchise.

The spacecraft at its center is not entirely fictional. The real Fermi Explorer Mission is a nonprofit initiative co-founded by Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston. It intends to launch a small spacecraft toward Alpha Centauri before the end of 2029 using currently achievable technology and a budget below $15 million.

Its journey could take approximately 80,000 years. That enormous timeline makes the project both an engineering experiment and a message to generations unimaginably far in the future, which is precisely the relationship between hopeful storytelling and real technological ambition that the Future Vision XPRIZE was created to encourage.

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