6 Movies That Accurately Predicted The Future

Most movies have yet to come true (hello Willy Wonka, where is my room of candy?) but every so often there is a movie that, in retrospect, made an incredibly accurate prediction regarding the future. Here are a few.

Back To the Future II

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Yes, we are still waiting for those hoverboards to become a regular part of our lives, but many of the other predictions that were made in Marty’s trip to the future were surprisingly accurate. Among the technological predictions that we see, there are motion sensor and wireless video games and also video calls and teleconferences. Aside from those techy predictions, Back to the Future also made a number of other surprisingly accurate predictions, such as Miami having a baseball team and Vietnam becoming a tourist destination.

The Truman Show

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The Truman Show is a remarkable movie that makes a commentary about the infiltration of reality TV into our society, asking the question, how far is too far? It seems like the perfect critique of an age that has brought us television shows about two-year-old beauty queens, half-mocking shows about people with serious health problems, and other shows about people who are famous for nothing. But wait, suddenly you realize that The Truman Show was released in 1998. A quick scan of reality television offerings in 1998 will give you little more that COPS and The Real World. The Truman Show was eerily accurate in its prediction of the way that this genre would evolve in the years that followed.

Minority Report

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Minority Report is another example of a film with a stark contrast between that which it got right, and that which it got wrong. Obviously we have not yet developed technology that will help us to predict future crimes (which, if you have seen the movie, is probably a good thing). However, a number of things in that movie were accurately predicted — like targeted advertising that we see everywhere, and the use of touch/motion sensitive technology.

Airplane II

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This is one movie that you probably didn’t expect to see on a list like this, but surprisingly Airplane II was right regarding one very specific aspect of our society today. In the movie we see airport security using full body scanners and viewing a naked video of each passenger who passes through. As anyone who has been to an airport recently knows, this is very much a reality.

War Games

This 1983 Matthew Broderick movie might be dated when you watch it now (floppy disks! Cold War!) it actually presents a surprisingly accurate portrayal of hacking in a computer age. Just as the teenage protagonist accidentally hacks into the government’s supercomputer at the Pentagon, hacktivists are everywhere these days, needing only a computer and something to break into. The Net, starring Sandra Bullock, also made a similar prediction in 1995.

Videodrome

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Apparently 1983 was a good year for fortune-telling, because another soothsaying movie came out that year, this one called Videodrome. If you have seen it, you understand why it belongs on this list. You are also probably traumatized to your very core, even to this day. However, the movie gets props for predicting a couple of major things about today’s society. Not only has 50 Shades of Grey made torture porn mainstream, but the threat of increasing media, and in particular the social, viral nature of it that is now the norm was also predicted in Videodrome.