Here are Cinephile Corner’s 10 recommendations for movies like WarGames:
A House of Dynamite
Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is the closest modern cousin to WarGames’ war-room panic: a single unidentified missile is headed for the United States, and the film replays the same frantic minutes from the bunkers, situation rooms, and the Oval Office, where Idris Elba’s president weighs an impossible call. The procedural detail is gripping, even if the Netflix thriller ultimately fizzles out by refusing to commit to its own argument.
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
Forty years after WOPR nearly started World War III, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt goes up against a rogue artificial intelligence known as the Entity. Dead Reckoning turns the anxiety of a machine nobody can control into a globe-trotting chase, with Christopher McQuarrie staging some of the franchise’s most astounding set pieces, from a cliffside motorcycle jump to a runaway train.
Read our full review of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
The follow-up raises the stakes to exactly where WarGames left them: an AI threatening to seize the world’s nuclear arsenals. The Final Reckoning is an uneven joyride, heavy on exposition and franchise callbacks, but its submarine and biplane sequences rank with the series’ best and earned it a spot among the best action movies of 2025.
Read our full review of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
Blackhat
If David Lightman’s dial-up break-ins were the thrill of WarGames, Michael Mann’s Blackhat imagines the grown-up, globalized version. Chris Hemsworth plays an imprisoned hacker released to help American and Chinese authorities track down whoever sabotaged a nuclear power plant with a few lines of code. Mann shoots the digital world like a physical one, and the result is a moody, underrated cyber-thriller.
Oppenheimer
WarGames asks what happens when we hand the bomb to a computer; Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer goes back to the man who helped build it. Cillian Murphy is mesmerizing as J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the film’s portrait of scientific triumph curdling into lifelong dread is the origin story for every Cold War thriller that followed. It’s the best biopic of the decade.
Ex Machina
Joshua just wants to play a game; Ava, the android at the center of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, may be running a game of her own on the humans testing her. Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, and Alicia Vikander form a tense triangle in a remote research compound, and Garland’s debut remains his clearest allegory about the people who build thinking machines.
M3GAN
A toy company engineer, played by Allison Williams, builds a lifelike doll to look after her orphaned niece, and the programming takes its mission a little too literally. Gerard Johnstone’s M3GAN is a campier take on the runaway-AI premise, but it’s surprisingly refreshing for a concept that has been tried time and again.
The Social Network
Before Matthew Broderick’s whiz kid nearly hacked his way into Armageddon, he was just a bright, bored teenager at a keyboard. David Fincher’s The Social Network follows another one, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose late-night coding spree in a Harvard dorm changes the world in ways no one anticipates. Aaron Sorkin’s script crackles, and the film remains a masterpiece.
Videodrome
Released the same year as WarGames, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome channels a very different strain of 1980s technophobia. James Woods plays a sleazy cable TV programmer who stumbles onto a mysterious broadcast signal, and Debbie Harry co-stars in a body horror nightmare about screens rewiring the people who watch them. It grows more prescient every year.
Mission: Impossible
Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible features one of the great computer-terminal sequences in movie history: Tom Cruise dangling on wires above a CIA vault at Langley, trying not to let a single drop of sweat hit the floor. Like WarGames, it finds real suspense in a glowing screen, and its intricate double-crosses launched a blockbuster franchise.
READ MORE: Movies Like A House of Dynamite, Sci-Fi Movies Like Ex Machina, The 50 Best Science Fiction Movies of All Time
