Last September, we debuted one of our most popular feature articles titled 13 Movies That Predicted Other Movies, and thanks to how well it was received — as well as suggestions in the comments section — we’ve got 13 more where that came from!
Ever noticed that certain ideas or little moments in one movie seem to take on a life of their own and lead to other movies? We did too, and we’ve assembled a gallery featuring just such instances where connecting the dots led to small aspects of certain films literally predicting and/or inspiring future movies.
It could be a little bit of set dressing that gets fans tongues wagging about possibilities, or it could be a line of dialogue or music cue that connects to another role an actor would go on to play. Filmmakers like Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino and others planted some very prophetic seeds in some of their pictures, and we’ve gone over all of them with a fine-tooth comb so you don’t have to.
Gaze into our crystal ball and check out these Nostradamus-like flicks in the gallery below, and sound off in the comments if you can think of others we missed!
13 More Movies That Predicted Other Movies
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I Am Legend (2007)/Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)
A marquee ad for a "Batman vs Superman" movie in Times Square amidst the post-apocalyptic landscape of I Am Legend may have been more than just wishful thinking. The vampire film's screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who wrote the poorly-received Batman & Robin, had been hired by Warner Bros. to rewrite Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay for a "Batman vs. Superman" movie not long before this film was made. Now a different incarnation of the same concept is coming out next month, and Will Smith is also part of the DC Extended Universe playing Deadshot in Suicide Squad.
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The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)/Life of Pi (2012)
This may be the most bizarrely coincidental incident on this list, but for acclaimed actor Irrfan Khan, the year 2012 was the year of Richard Parker. In the reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, Khan played evil Oscorp executive Dr. Rajit Ratha, and central to the plot is Peter Parker's deceased father Richard Parker (Campbell Scott). Just a few months later, Khan was in theaters playing the unreliable narrator Pi Patel in Ang Lee's Life of Pi, where his younger self tangles with a Bengal tiger named -- you guessed it -- Richard Parker. Weird.
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The Dead Zone (1983)/Sleepy Hollow (1999)
In David Cronenberg's cult classic Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone, Christopher Walken's school teacher Johnny Smith recommends his class read Washington Irving's classic "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." He later says to his love interest Brooke Adams:
"It reminds me of a line from 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' the last story I read to my class before... the accident. Ichabod Crane disappears... the line goes: 'As he was a bachelor, and in nobody's debt, nobody troubled their head about him anymore.'"
He later, of course, played The Headless Horseman himself in Tim Burton's loose 1999 adaptation of the story.
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Edward Scissorhands (1990)/Mars Attacks (1996)
Here's another connection between two Tim Burton films. In the beloved Edward Scissorhands, there's an awkward seduction scene between Kathy Baker's Joyce and the title character in which Tom Jones' song "With These Hands" plays prominently. Six years later, Burton featured the singer playing himself amidst an alien invasion in Mars Attacks!
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Predator 2 (1990)/AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)
The climactic scene in Predator 2 where Danny Glover boards the alien's spacecraft and comes across a trophy room complete with a Xenomorph skull made sci-fi fans literally giddy with excitement. The possibilities of these two iconic baddies going mano a mano seemed to have so much potential, and after several comic books and video games, two movies were launched beginning in 2004 and ending in 2007's Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. The results proved to be… less than stellar, proving that some ideas are best left as Easter eggs.
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The Hunt for Red October (1990)/Jurassic Park (1993)/The Horse Whisperer (1998)
"I would like to have seen Montana," says Sam Neill's Captain Vasily Borodin before kicking the bucket in submarine classic The Hunt For Red October. Little did the actor know that a mere three years later he'd be playing paleontologist Alan Grant on a dig in Snakewater, Montana for blockbuster Jurassic Park. A few years after that he would be on Robert Redford's horse ranch near Livingston, Montana for The Horse Whisperer. Some dreams do come true, folks!
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Gangs of New York (2002)/Lincoln (2012)
Daniel Day-Lewis is known for nailing it when it comes to giving breathtaking performances, but this is ridiculous. In Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York he plays anti-abolitionist gang leader William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, who in one scene desecrates a picture of Lincoln by throwing a knife at the President's face. A decade later Day-Lewis would win his third Oscar playing Lincoln, making us wonder if the scene in Scorsese's movie wasn't just him marking his territory.
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U Turn (1997)/Walk the Line (2005)
In Oliver Stone's neo noir U Turn, Joaquin Phoenix plays a guy who, for all intents and purposes, looks like Johnny Cash, and the song "Ring of Fire" accompanies his appearance in a scene where he confronts Sean Penn. Eight years later Phoenix would be nominated for an Oscar for playing Cash in James Mangold's biopic Walk the Line.
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Spy Kids (2001)/Machete (2010)
Long before he got the women and killed the bad guys as Machete in the Grindhouse trailer that became the movies Machete and Machete Kills, Danny Trejo was Isador "Machete" Cortez, a.k.a. Uncle Machete in the four Spy Kids movies. He's essentially the same character, although the version in the kids movies is obviously much tamer and less prone to dismembering people. Robert Rodriguez always intended to give the character his own Jean-Claude Van Damme-style action showcase, but only got around to it after the popularity of the Grindhouse trailer.
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True Romance (1993)/Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)
Anyone who knows anything about Quentin Tarantino knows the man is absolutely gaga for kung-fu movies. In one of his earliest scripts for True Romance, he stages a whole scene in a movie theater in which the two main characters meet-cute during a showing of Sonny Chiba's 1974 movie The Street Fighter. A decade later Tarantino would cast the martial artist in his blood-spattered epic Kill Bill as legendary swordmaker Hattori Hanzō.
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Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)/Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
Joe Dante has been a confirmed Warner Bros. animation nut his entire life, and that cartoon sensibility has informed many of his movies. For the anything-goes sequel to Gremlins, he featured Chuck Jones-directed animated sequences in the opening and closing credits as a way of signaling to the audience the kind of anarchic movie they were in for. When he later made the hybrid live-action/animated Looney Tunes: Back in Action, it was a rough experience for Dante, who referred to the constant creative interference from Warner Bros. and the resulting uneven film "the longest year and a half of my life." That's a shame, because despite the film's flaws there are brilliant gags and sequences that make it worthy of Bugs Bunny fans everywhere.
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Xenogenesis (1978)/Avatar (2009)
James Cameron's earliest publically-released short, titled Xenogenesis, features an opening montage of concept paintings by the future King of the World extrapolating on the potential world he was not able to accrue a budget for. One image is of a slender blue female alien not unlike Zoe Saldana's Neytiri from his three-decades later sci-fi record-breaker Avatar. The short also has the vehicle that evolved into the concept of a power loader from Aliens.
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The Happening (2008)/The Last Airbender (2010)
Speaking of Avatar… Most fans of Nickelodeon's animated series "Avatar: The Last Airbender" tend not to speak too highly of M. Night Shyamalan's 2010 film adaptation, which effectively killed the idea of a cinematic franchise of the property. You can't say that Shyamalan wasn't into the show, though, especially since he made it a point to feature a child character wearing a backpack featuring the "Avatar: The Last Airbender" logo in his 2008 B-horror movie The Happening. Chances are he already had his eye on adapting it at that point, so it's just a fun little nod to what he hoped his next project would be. But, as Morgan Freeman said in The Shawshank Redemption, "Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane."
