The 2003 movie Roger Ebert accurately predicted the title of a decade before it was released
A humble movie critic wouldn’t be so bold as to try to predict the future, but Roger Ebert still managed to do it without even trying, which arguably makes it all the more impressive.
Some of the things that he thought were destined to happen didn’t come to pass, either, but he’d have been glad about that. Ebert abhorred the onslaught of 3D in the wake of James Cameron’s Avatar, but once audiences started voting with their wallets, the craze thankfully began to fade out.
An extra dimension is worthwhile if a film has been created with it in mind, but when you’ve got shitty post-conversions being lobbed onto cinema screens for no other reason than to squeeze some extra pennies out of the customer, then you can understand why he called it a “suicidal” development.
Ebert would never have claimed to have precognitive abilities, and in an industry as reactive as cinema, trying to guess where anything is heading can be proven wrong the next day. However, he was ahead of the competition in 1994, when he spit-balled a title for a film that wouldn’t be released until 2003.
These days, you could throw darts at a dartboard covered in prefixes, suffixes, and subtitles, and there’d be a decent chance you’d land on something a Hollywood franchise would genuinely use. Returns, Origins, The Rise Of, The Final Chapter, The Return Of, and countless other uninspired addendums.
What made Ebert’s prediction additionally fascinating was that the movie he was talking about and the one he prophesied had one major thing in common: both of them were headlined by musclebound, disconcertingly vascular, European action heroes who couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag.
Admittedly, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Timecop is one of his better efforts, but that’s not saying much when most of them are fucking horrendous. Still, take one ‘Muscles from Brussels’, theorise on an ‘Austrian Oak’, and you’ve got a recipe for reading the tea leaves before they’ve been picked off the vine.
“It’s not so much that the premise of the original Terminator has been ripped off,” Ebert mused on Timecop. “As that Hollywood went travelling into the past and inalterably ripped the fabric of time, and that’s why we got Timecop with Van Damme, instead of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines with Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Maybe he’d heard it whispered throughout Hollywood, but even at that, the earliest mention of Rise of the Machines was in the late ’90s when Tedi Sarafian wrote a draft of the screenplay, years after Van Damme had roundhouse kicked his way through time. Coincidence, prediction, or someone in the know? It remains unanswered, so we’ll leave it up to you to decide.
