24 Frames

24 Predictions For 2019 (According To The Movies)

In Blade Runner, The Running Man, and Michael Bay we trust.

by | December 31, 2018 | Comments

The year 2019: Once a far-off time, once a vessel for writers and filmmakers to explore their hopes, dreams, and fears of the future. A time to wonder what advanced technology we’d be living with, and how much societal and moral progress we would have made. If any.

But reality has trouble keeping up with imagination. 2000 arrived without our electronics turning on us. We threw away our granite Maya calendars when 2012 came and went with nary a shower of brimstone. And 2015 gave us a third Human Centipede, yet no Mattel pink hoverboards. Will 2019 have more success?

To find out, we watched movies set in 2019 to uncover what predictive treasures they may clutch. Stuff like Blade Runner, The Running Man, The Island, Daybreakers, Geostorm, Heatseeker, Steel Frontier, 2019: After the Fall of New York, and The New Barbarians. (Akira is another 2019-set movie, though we opted to stick with live-action predictions.) Together, they form a kind of crystal ball, fragmentary and smoke-filled (seriously, the fog machine budget on these movies was NUTS), and when shaken provide a glimpse into this brave new world of 2019. Keep this gallery close at hand as the year unfolds, and see just how many of these 24 movie predictions become real.