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Science fiction movies often take place in the distant future, allowing people to imagine what life might be like hundreds of years from now. While that's a common option, it's not the only one. Some movies chose to depict a future distant only a few years, or decades, and since they've been filmed a long time ago, the future they presented has already happened.
In most cases, the movie's vision of what the world would be like in the future didn't happen, which is good news since a majority of them worked with the notion of something going wrong before the year 2022.
7 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Stanley Kubrick is one of the most iconic science fiction directors of all time and his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey changed the world of cinema forever. Regardless of how influential the movie was, it didn't capture the year 2001 accurately.
21 years ago, space exploration was less advanced than in 2022 and even today, humanity is mostly staying down on Earth, not exploring space as they did in the movie. While that might seem unfortunate to some, at least it means the astronauts don't have to risk dealing with a murderous computer HAL like the human heroes of the movie did.
6 Escape From New York (1981)
Science fiction movies that depict a close future often show to portray it as dark and dangerous. Escape from New York fits this rule. The story takes place in 1997 and Kurt Russell plays a man who has to find the President of the United States in the closed-off Manhattan island populated by criminals and get the President to safety.
Unsurprisingly, this won't be an easy task. Everyone who has ever visited New York will, of course, know that Manhattan remains open to people and doesn't serve as an unorthodox penitentiary as it does in this movie.
5 Blade Runner (1982)
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It's no secret that the first Blade Runner movie that premiered in 1982 took place in 2019. The movie offered a glimpse of the world, it didn't show the entire society, but one significant detail that the real world lacked back in 2019 is the artificial life form that was almost impossible to distinguish from real people.
In the movie's fictional world, replicants were a fairly common occurrence, even though they were hunted and persecuted. The technological advancements haven't progressed enough to be able to create such complex beings, so even though Blade Runner excelled in many aspects, its portrayal of the future wasn't accurate.
4 Terminator (1984)
Terminator doesn't create a very optimistic future, but fortunately, it didn't come to pass. According to the first and second movies directed by James Cameron, the machines were supposed to take over the world in 1997 and kill millions of people.
The so-called Judgment Day would lead to decades of death and destruction until John Connor would start leading the surviving humans and turned things around. Even though machines and technology in general progressed greatly in the last years, there's still no such system as developed as Skynet that would function as an artificial intelligence and could decide to clear the planet Earth of all humans.
3 Back To The Future 2 (1989)
Fans of the science fiction trilogy, and especially the second movie from 1989, were disappointed when the year 2015 came and no flying cars were available on the market. In the Back to the Future series, the future is portrayed in a more positive and optimistic way than in the Terminator series, and it's full of technological advancements.
Today's world also offers plenty of new inventions and possibilities, but the ones portrayed in Back to the Future still remain fictional. Most notably of all, time travel is impossible, at least in the way the movie would like the audience to believe.
2 The Island (2005)
Michael Bay is primarily known for his action movies, and The Island also contains a fair amount of action even though it's a science fiction movie. Just like Blade Runner, the story takes place in 2019. The movie works with the concept of a complex full of people who are living in a strictly sealed facility, presumably because the world outside is contaminated and unable to support life.
That's not quite the case as it shows when the main heroes discover that the world is fine and that everybody living in a facility is a clone belonging to someone rich who can use the clone for harvesting organs if something goes wrong. Cloning is something that scientists have been studying for quite a while now, but it's not advanced enough to be able to clone an entire human being.
1 Daybreakers (2009)
It seems that the year 2019 was a popular setting for many science fiction movies created in the past. Vampires are popular creatures, but the ones appearing in the movie, are far from friendly. In fact, they overran the Earth, and humans and their blood are in short supply.
Fortunately, there seems to be a way how to cure the vampires - if only the heroes survive long enough to do so. In 2020, close to 2019, the world, of course, had to deal with a different pandemic, but vampires continue to be a matter of legends and storytelling.