As a genre, science fiction has long provided a way for audiences to imagine the future. A lot of the best sci-fi films of prior decades pictured what life would be like in the years to come. Such movies asked: What would America and the world look like in the 1980s? What about the 1990s? The 2000s?
Well, now it’s 2022. We’ve lived through the future. We actually know what a lot of those years were like and, as it turns out, most of those movies were utterly and totally wrong.
Brilliant as many of these films were at predicting broader shifts in technology and science, the actual, literal predictions about what the future would look like were often totally inaccurate. Sometimes they were sorta right. Other times they were just completely and totally off base. Let’s take a quick look at some of your favorite movies and how incorrect they were about the future.