Some of the genre's best movies would take place in some arbitrary future date. 1997 was a common year in a slew of titles, such as Terminator, 12 Monkeys, and of course... Escape from New York. That one (released 1981) depicts a what-if scenario 16 years from itself. Could New York City really turn to shit like that in 16 years? I'm sure it seemed somewhat believable to those watching it in its first run. 16 years from now, could Manhattan still become a prison island?
"Look, I am not stupid, you know. They cannot make things like that yet."
"Not yet. Not for about 40 years."
Did T1 set itself too early? With this particular story, it needs to be contained within a range of years relative to the immediate Connor family. That's how we get that grandfather paradox plot, but did they think we would get that advanced in but four decades?
When people would see T1, they might ponder if we could have destroyed ourselves that bad by 2029. We still aren't there yet, but we missed Judgment Day altogether. When T2 came out, it gave us that specific August 29th, 1997 date to look forward to. There might have been some concern during those 6 years that movie would prove itself true or not. I mean, those movies were so bad-ass, it definitely seemed possible. Fortunately, we averted that Judgment Day, but it'll always live on as a useless piece of trivia in ol' brain.
It's those future 2020s dates when the machines we all know and love came to be. Our level of robotics is still very early in its development. We have some that can maintain balance, but nothing could be described as being as convincing as an 800 series. Nothing that can pretend it's a human, but that's a very good thing. A boring thing, but a good thing for our safety as a species.
Blade Runner is also a hoot, because they thought 37 years from 1982 could have flying cars, offworld mining, and replicants. Both this movie and Back to the Future 2 thought the 2010s would have us in hover cars, but our development of technological innovation got stunted there somewhere down the line. We didn't keep up the trend of upping ourselves and we're not mining offworlds or even doing any cool space shit.
BttF2 also thought we'd have a lot of Jaws sequels, but there wasn't even ONE after that movie. It's as if that joke put an end to that franchise once and for all. And the Cubs came close to winning that 2015 game, but they let us ALL down, and now none of that movie's predictions are right. Fuck baseball.
Here's a fun one though: Soylent Green predicted that 2022 would have 40 million people in NYC. The current population is like... 8.4 or something? But come mid-November, the world will be at that 8 billion population. We were half that in the 70s. Stupid humans, breeding like
Any thoughts on future years that happened differently?
Or a better question would be... are there any future date predictions in movies that actually came true?