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January really is the Monday of months, isn’t it? Christmas is already a distant memory. Everyone is either already back at work, or about to go back. Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, a lot of places are cold and grey. Your wallet and waistline have both taken a battering. We just want it to be over. Welcome to 2025!
Speaking of 2025, doesn’t it sound wildly futuristic? I am fairly sure I should have had a flying car by now. I should have been wearing bacofoil trousers and had my own personal robot butler. Instead, we have people thinking they can change gender just by saying it, and mostly peaceful terrorists.
To paraphrase Buzz Aldrin, you bastards promised me a moonbase, and delivered Facebook!
But what did the world of movies promise us for 2025 when it really was the wild and crazy future? Is it anything like the world we really ended up with?
Marvel
I had never really thought of this before, but all of Marvel is now set slightly in the future as the time jump in Endgame to cover the blip was 5 years, meaning Thanos was ultimately defeated in 2023, four years after the movie was actually released.
This means that Thor: Love & Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever were actually set in 2025, despite a 2022 release date.
So what did they get right? That Taika Waititi’s schtick would have worn thin, and Chadwick Boseman would have passed away. Other than that, not a great lookout for either Wakanda or pan-galactic inter-dimensional space Norwegians.
Kaiju
Pacific Rim was set in 2025, which still seemed like the future back in 2013. Pacific Rim predicted that politicians would decide to spend their money on building a giant wall when the best course of action all along was to build huge robots to twat the f__k out of invading monsters.
This really feels like there is a lesson in there somewhere, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Either way, we are yet to discover anyoen as excellently named as Stacker Pentecost, and if they really are going to “Cancel the apocalopse” I just wish they would get on with it.
Organs
Repo Men was based on a novel. It portrays a future 2025 in which organ transplants are easier to come by than ever before, thanks to synthetic tech, which come with outrageous finance terms and the possibility of a less than comfortable removal in the event of non payment.
It feels like it is poking the US healthcare system, big pharma, and all related entries in the venn diagram with a sharp stick. Has anything which they forsaw in 2010 when the movie was released looked like coming to pass?
Probably not as extreme, but as we look back and all feel a little embaressed about a lot of the COVID adjacent stuff, you can probably argue that bad stuff did happen, just in a completely different way.
Leather Apocalypse
We can’t talk about the predicted future without thinking about those evocative posters and VHS covers that enthralled our younger selves in the video store. We can’t talk about the movies behind those posters without turning to something that involved the complete destuction of New York, an Italian director, and many different release names depending on which territory you were in.
Yes, It’s Bronx: The Final Battle, or Bronx Lotta Finale, or Endgame. Either way, it is set in a 2025 where a nuclear holocaust in the late 1990s has left New York City an irradiated, but not abandoned, wasteland.
The ruined city is inhabited now by scavenger packs and telepathic mutants, who are persecuted by the elite survivors. Keeping the few remaining people pacified is the reality television program Endgame, where hunters and gladiators fight to the death for large financial winnings. This all seems dreadfully familiar so far.
Elites ruling over a ruined shell of a city? Media manipulation of the masses? I swear, sometimes these punchlines simply write themselves.
Honorable Mention
Endgame made me think of this. The original novel The Running Man by Stephen King was set in 2025. This was changed to 2017 to 2019 for the Schwarzenegger movie. A restless population kept molified by televisiual entertainment? Nah, that would never happen.
So over to you, beloved Outposters. What other movies were set in 2025 and what did they promise vs. what was delivered? What were your expectations for 2025 vs. the dystopian hellscape reality seems determined to deliver sometimes?
And where the f__k is my flying car!?
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