It's hard to make an apples to apples comparison with sci-fi.
I have a great fondness for putting things into categories.
Science Fantasy is a subtype typified by Star Wars and Flash Gordon. There are some crappier Science Fantasy such as Mortal Engines. Science Fantasy is fun action in exotic locales with amazing technology and supernatural events but if you scrutinize anything in too fine of detail it falls apart. This was really popular sci-fi between 1900s and 1940s which included Flash Gordon which spawned Star Wars. You rarely see science fantasy anymore in the 21st century. Dare I say, apart from Star Wars, most recent science fantasy movies and shows are steaming flops. The Sci-Fi channel used to have a fair number of science fantasy television series and these weren't outright flops but they did they fail to make enough money to last very long. Most of the most successful science fantasy products are legacies, Flash Gordon, Star Wars, and Doctor Who but they are all kind of faltering.
Since I have been analyzing fantasy genres with a fine tooth comb and I've put a LOT of thought into hard magic systems versus soft magic system. I guess you could argue there is hard sci-fi versus soft sci-fi. For instance I would say
Ender's Game (the book at least) is very hard sci-fi and Flash Gordon is very soft sci-fi.
TV tropes has one trope called "five minutes into the future". The world is ostensibly like the "real world" but one giant thing is different. The original X-Men movies works this way. Everything is the same but also mutants.
Minority Report, everything is the same except we have precognitive psychics enslaved by the government. I guess Minority Report has a little bit of technology we don't have such as police batons that induce vomiting or holographic advertisements that talk to you by name, but that was a small.
I-Robot was mostly like the real world but with advanced robots. The Fox show Dark Angel was the real world except America had a huge financial depression but also black ops cloning. Just this year, we have
Wifelike which is pretty much the real world + realistic human-like robots. A more feminist spin on the 2001 movie
A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Haley Joel Osment (The kid from
Sixth Sense) was great, I'm sorry his career as an actor never made it past adulthood. If there was a category for under rated gems, I would put
Second Hand Lions at or near the top of the list. Haley Joel Osment was technically the star but I guess his mentors did the heavy lifting. It might be the last Coming of Age genre movie that doesn't cater to
the Message and actually featured positive masculine role models.
Dystopian sci-fis are huge. Looking back in sci-fi between 1960 and 1990, that seemed to be 90% of all sci-fi. That's why Star Trek was so ground breaking. It was optimistic. I would argue that Disney Star Wars is slowly moving into dystopian direction. Bad Robot Star Trek is not moving in a dystopian direction, it
is a dystopian genre now. That's not to say I
never like dystopian sci-fi. I just think it is over done. I prefer very broad dystopian sci-fi. Nowadays a lot of dystopian sci-fi relates to "Orange Man Bad". If you go back far enough, it's not hard to find sci-fi dystopias that make references to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, etc. This kind of stuff doesn't age well.
Then you also have dystopias that refer to well-known histories. Lots of Hitler analogies, a few Stalin analogies. Big Brother from
1984 is actually a composite of Hitler and Stalin. Ancient Rome is popular to borrow.
Starship Troopers used iconography from Ancient
and the WWII Germans. Neil Patrick Harris' uniform was not very subtle.
That's a little better than contemporary politics but not all history analogies are created equally.
Then you got sci-fi comedies, sci-fi thrillers, sci-fi horrors, sci-fi romance.
Star Wars is an integral part of my childhood, and nothing will change this. I just don't enjoy re-watching the movies like I used to.
If I have kids I will make them watch the original six Star Wars (probably in the order they came out) just because I use a lot of Star Wars metaphors in daily conversation, but if they don't really don't take to it, no biggie.
Hopefully if I have a daughter she'll take to My Little Pony, Friendship is Magic. It is very important she watch
the anti-communist episode. I'm not sure if there is an equivalent boys cartoon for the same age range.