What These Movies Predicted About 2023

You don't need to be a psychic with supernatural abilities or even own a shiny prognosticating crystal ball to predict the future. All you really need to be is a screenwriter with a laptop and a lot of strong black coffee (and maybe a studio willing to invest tens of millions of dollars into your big idea). Filmmakers have been predicting the future since the days of Georges Méliès ("A Trip To The Moon") and Fritz Lang ("Metropolis"). While some of their predictions have proved prescient (humanity did indeed make it to the moon), many others haven't panned out. The robot uprisings predicted in "The Terminator," "The Matrix," and dozens of other dystopian movies, thankfully, haven't come to pass (yet). Now, we come to 2023, and based on the movies, this year is set to be a doozy. 

What can we expect? Just your usual assortment of apocalyptic annihilations, alien invasions, societal breakdowns, and time travel shenanigans. Why doesn't any filmmaker ever predict a pleasant future? Beats us. We also don't know why many of these films chose "2023" for their setting other than it sounds more legit than "vague time in the not-too-distant future." Well, the new year is here, so let's find out what these movies predicted for 2023!

In the 2016 film "Don't Breathe," three thieves make the mistake of breaking into the home of a blind man. However, they soon find out that the blind man is former Navy SEAL Norman Nordstrom (Stephen Lang), and he's anything but helpless. If the thieves had seen "Avatar," they would have thought twice before busting in on Stephen Lang. The film is vaguely set in 2015 or 2016, while the sequel, "Don't Breathe 2," is set roughly eight years later, placing it around 2023, which co-writer and director Fede Álvarez confirmed in an interview with Forbes. 

So what has happened to Nordstrom in the intervening years? Well, he's raising a young girl to recreate his former family life, but when the girl is kidnapped by criminals, Nordstrom is forced to go full John Rambo to rescue her. Basically, it's "Commando" crossed with "Daredevil." Of all the films on our list, "Don't Breathe 2" is one of the most believable, as it's simply set in the future, not about the future. Because the precise 2023 setting is incidental and not intentional, the future that "Don't Breathe 2" predicts is pretty much like our world today. However, the well-worn "blind badass" trope, which goes back to "The Tale of Zatoichi," happens to be true. Take, for example, blind martial artist David Black, who is highly skilled in aikido and jiu-jitsu. We strongly advise thieves to not break into his house.

"The Purge" is a five-film franchise and two-season TV series that predicts a near-future America that observes an annual event in which all crime is legalized during a 12-hour period. In the sequel, 2014's "The Purge: Anarchy," Frank Grillo plays an off-duty LAPD police sergeant who takes four innocent people under his (heavily armed) wings to protect them during the annual purge, taking place on March 21, 2023. While we hope a purge never happens in the future, it did happen in the past. 

The pre-Christian Roman pagans celebrated a festival called Saturnalia, during which citizens could basically do whatever they wanted and were encouraged to act out their desires without fear of legal consequences, leading to violence, vandalism, and murder. However, in ancient Rome, the laws weren't suspended for just 12 hours but for a whole week from December 17th to the 25th. And you thought your office holiday party was wild! 

Thankfully, that was just the past, right? Well, in September 2022, TikTok was abuzz with fears of a real-life purge in Illinois, based on the Prairie State's impending passage of the SAFE-T Act on January 1, 2023, so maybe not.

Netflix's "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is a legacy sequel to "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and takes place 50 years after the events original, placing the 2022 film in 2023. (Although the original was released in 1974, the opening crawl of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" asserts that the events of the first film take place in August of 1973.) "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is the ninth film in the franchise, and predicts a future that sounds just like the other eight films in the series: A group of innocent teenagers runs into the sadistic serial killer Leatherface, who murders them one by one. If you've seen one, you have seen them all, as this film's dismal critical and audience reception keeps it from being one of the best legacy sequels. "Top Gun: Maverick," this is not. 

Despite being an over-the-top horror movie, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" makes the most accurate predictions of any movie on our list because its story about a serial killer slaughtering a bunch of innocent people has already happened ...  many times. While the exact events of "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" are purely fictional, the film is based in part on the real-life murderer, Ed Gein. Gein lived in Wisconsin, not Texas, and only killed two people (Leatherface says, "Hold my chainsaw"). However, he was a notorious grave robber who made decorations out of the desecrated bodies he dug up. Gein also inspired Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film "Psycho" and, possibly, Jeffrey Dahmer as well. Here's hoping that if they make another Ed Gein movie in 2023 (or whenever), people won't thirst after "The Plainfield Ghoul" the way they did Dahmer and Ted Bundy.

Released in 2014 and set in 2023, "Alien Rising" (aka "Gemini Rising") tells the story of a former Homeland Security agent sent to a remote island by the military to study alien technology. However, she must stop them once she discovers that her boss, Col. Stephen Cencula (Lance Henriksen), is not only keeping an alien prisoner but plans on using extraterrestrial tech to create a mind control serum to sell to a North Korean billionaire. According to the film, the going rate for an alien mind control serum is $4 billion, about $40 billion less than what Elon Musk paid for Twitter, so we bet Col. Cencula could have haggled for a lot more. 

Let's be honest. If you're working for Lance Henriksen, you know he's up to no good, so that's by far the most outlandish part of the movie. Yet, it turns out this schlocky sci-fi film's predictions about the government using mind control as a weapon may not be that far off, as the CIA performed human experiments in mind control in real life. Dubbed MK-ULTRA, the CIA's super-secret mind control program may not have used alien technology to control people's minds, but it did incorporate everything from electroshock to high doses of LSD. MK-ULTRA was eventually shut down, but not because it literally killed people. The program's head, chemist Sidney Gottlieb, concluded mind control isn't possible. It's a good thing Gottlieb never got his hands on alien tech.

"Avengers: Infinity War" ends in 2018, and the events of "Avengers: Endgame" take place five years later. Using kindergarten-level math, that places "Endgame" in 2023. So what can we expect? "Avengers: Endgame" predicts a future in which half of all life in the entire universe has been erased from existence by a malevolent demigod with six magical stones housed in an all-powerful gauntlet. So there's that. The good news?  A team of superheroes has devised a clever scheme to travel back in time and recover the stones to reverse the Mad Titan's schemes. 

Believe it or not, the time travel plot of "Avengers: Endgame" is the most scientifically plausible part of the film. Unlike many time travel movies, which propose traveling back in time to alter a shared future (looking at you "Terminator"), "Avengers Endgame" argues that traveling back in time only affects that individual timeline. Hence, the team didn't just travel back to Thanos' crib to smother him as a baby (that would be pretty mean). While this time travel theory is more likely than, say, "Back To The Future," most modern physicists argue you can only time travel forward into the future, not back into the past. Time travel is a one-way trip because once you've arrived in the future, you're not getting back — even if you're Iron Man.