Self Fulfilling Prophecy / Live-Action Films

• A prophecy said that the title character in The Beastmaster would bring down the Big Bad, so the villain tried to have the boy killed before his birth, the act which gave him the beast empathy powers that led to the villain's downfall.
• Subverted in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: Cesare predicts that Alan has until dawn to live, and then goes and ensures the accuracy of his prediction. With a knife.
• In Caddyshack Al Czervik bets that Judge Smails will slice his drive into the woods. Despite claiming he never slices, this is enough to put the thought into his head, so he does indeed slice into the woods. Any avid golfer can tell you this happens all the time in Real Life.
• In The Chronicles of Riddick, Lord Marshal Zhylaw experiences Genocide Backfire when he kills off the entire Furyan Race to avoid death by one of their hands. Except he misses the infant who later became Riddick, who might not have even known or cared about Zhylaw's crimes if he didn't keep trying to kill Riddick and his friends. He actually missed two, and the other one saves Riddick's life.
  
  This part of Zhylaw's character is especially evident in the climax, where he is wounded while fighting Riddick before his second-in-command Vaako attempts to kill him and take his throne. Zhylaw uses his transportation ability to flee, but realizes too late that Riddick is waiting for him on the other end. Being forced to choose between dying at the hand of either Vaako or Riddick, he chooses the latter.
• In The Dark Crystal, the Chamberlain outright says that it's the prophecy's fault for causing the Genocide Backfire of the Gelflings. If it hadn't been for the prophecy, the Gelflings wouldn't have been annihilated, and the last survivors wouldn't have as much a motive to kill off the Skeksis by healing the Dark Crystal.
• In Dune: Part One, Paul Atreides has a vision of a terrible future in which a holy war is waged throughout the universe in his name. Throughout Dune: Part Two, he seeks to find ways to prevent that future, but he progressively comes to realize that he can't win against the Harkonnens and the Emperor if he doesn't go through with that prophecy (implanted by the Bene Gesserit) to rally the Fremen, and so he becomes a Dark Messiah and the film ends with the Fremen starting the holy war he thought he could prevent.
• More or less the backstory of the titular character in The Enchantress. She's a Japanese martial artist from a powerful Japanese sect who entered the Ming Dynasty, but she later fell in love with a Ming swordsman, becoming pregnant with his child in the process. But the Ming fears the Japanese's powers after learning of how the Japanese could potentially overwhelm their martial world and wipe out all members of the Ming practitioners, so they initiated a clan massacre on the Japanese, only for an ancient Shinto curse for her to return with her handmaidens in tow, as a group of Vengeful Ghosts who is now on a killing spree on the Ming.
• In the 2006 Bollywood superhero movie Krrish, a modern take on the ancient story of Krishna in the Mahabharata, the antagonist Dr. Arya builds a supercomputer that can predict the future. After seeing his own predicted death at the hands of Krrish, he begins hunting him down. Krrish's friend Kristian is shot dead by Dr. Arya when he is mistaken for Krrish. As a result, Krrish vows to revenge against Dr. Arya and eventually kills him. Dr. Arya's attempt to prevent his death led to it becoming true.
• Looper Doubles up on the trope to create the titular causal loop: Young Joe finally realizes that Old Joe attempting to kill Cid in 2044 (before he as the Rainmaker can kill Joe's wife) and the resulting death of Cid's mother is what turns him into the Rainmaker in the first place, in turn leading to Joe's loop being closed and the death of his wife in 2074. The Rainmaker himself is similarly implied to have closed the loops in an attempt to save his mother, which is how Joe ended up running his loop in the past in the first place.
• In Madame Web (2024), Ezekiel ultimately meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it. Having seen visions of the three future Spider-Women knocking off a ledge to his death, he assumed killing them when they were younger and powerless would allow him to change his fate. But his constant attacks on the three future Spider-Women caused a series of events that result in Cassie developing her powers as Madame Webb along with a reason to fight him, with her being the one who kills him.
• Unlike most examples, The Matrix series as a whole justifies this trope in that those prophesied about actually WANT to fulfill the prophecies made by the Oracle. Also further justified in that the Oracle may SEE the future, but she usually doesn't TELL the future. That is, she doesn't tell the Zionites what the future actually holds. She just tells them what they need to hear in order for that future to come about. The Oracle was a memetic program designed to understand and manipulate human emotions. Go figure.
  • The Oracle tells Neo not to worry about the vase. Neo turns around to see what vase she's talking about, and in the process knocks it over. Then she tells him to wonder about if he still would have broken it if she hadn't said anything.
  • Trinity said that the Oracle had told her she, Trinity, would fall in love with the guy who was the One from the prophecies. When Trinity fell in love with Neo, she used this to justify her belief that Neo was the One. But maybe she only fell in love with him because she thought he was the One? She was so fixated on the idea of the prophecy that she was unable to fall in love with anyone else, but once Morpheus announced Neo as The Chosen One, Trinity wanted desperately to believe in it. The shooting script actually included additional lines about Morpheus finding other "Ones" before, who all died (hence why Cypher tells Neo not to screw with Agents as others did and just run) and Trinity whispering to Neo that she knows he IS The One, because she had a feeling about him she did not have about others.
  • When Neo asked the Oracle if he was the One the first time he met her and she told him "No, not in this life", she was speaking the truth. He wasn't. Not at that point in time, anyway. This may also count as an inversion when her telling Neo that Morpheus would die for mistakenly believing Neo was the One unless Neo did something about it eventually led to Neo dying, and getting resurrected in a blatant Christian metaphor, and at THAT point he becomes the One. And gets himself crucified a few films later.
  • However, it's subverted when Neo, the Messianic Archetype "prophesied" by the Machines to perpetuate a cycle of death and rebirth of Zion that had repeated several times before, rebelled against the prophecy and later broke the cycle with the unwitting help of Smith. Then double subverted at the end when the Architect suggests that she planned all of it, thus the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy came about by just not telling Neo the real prophecy.
• Office Space: Tom Smykowski's prediction that he'll lose his job; since he apparently spent more time worrying about getting fired instead of preparing for the interview with the Bobs that he knew was coming, he's a nervous, sweaty wreck by the time he's in front of them and completely falls apart after a few questions that really shouldn't have been that difficult to answer. Needless to say, the Bobs assume his job isn't that important and can him.
• The Nameless Knight (Adsız Cengaver) is a Turkish fantasy film where a ruthless warlord and tyrant orders his newborn son to be drowned after learning a prophecy about his son overthrowing him in the future. The servant instead have the baby left in a basket flowing downriver (ala Moses in the Bulrushes) where the baby is adopted by a family serving the La Résistance, eventually growing up into the titular "Nameless Knight" to overthrow his evil father.
• Over the Edge: Everything the parents do to crack down on their children's criminal tendencies only leads to even worse outbursts since they don't accept the fact that their interest in making in profit is what is burning them out. Carl, who is warned by his father to stay away from reform school, ends up there by the end of the movie. Mr. Sloan spells it out for Fred.
  Mr. Sloan: Seems to me like you all were in such a hopped-up hurry to get out of the city that you turned your kids into exactly what you were trying to get away from.
• Paycheck. And not Paycheck. The newspaper scene plays this straight with the machine that can see the future, but the rest of the movie subverts this. Specifically, the machine sees in the future that there will be a plague. So, leaders use the machine to see who will get the plague, round them all up and keep them together to prevent it from spreading. Surprise! They all get the plague. The machine predicts a war with another country, so leaders launch a preemptive strike against the evil country and the result is a war. By seeing the future, the leaders create the future, which they then see. It's weird and circular but makes sense: the machine doesn't so much see the future, it sees the future that the machine will create merely by existing.
• In Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Blackbeard is prophesied to die at the hands of the "One-Legged Man". Convinced that he can't beat the prophecy but can cheat it, he sets sail for the Fountain of Youth. This plan of action creates two critical mistakes which allow the prophecy to come to pass: he has given the One-Legged Man a location at which to find him, and in reaching it deprives himself of the considerable magical abilities granted to him by the combination of his enchanted sword and ship.
• The Sandra Bullock film Premonition, mixed with Anachronic Order via Unstuck in Time. This is a particularly frightening example, because of the Anachronic Order nature of the film, she spends every other day as one before and one after her husband dies, and spends the movie trying to prevent his death not knowing that her eventual presence at the scene of his accident is what causes it.
• In Sex and Death 101, Roderick gets a list of all the sexual partners he will ever have in his lifetime. Reading the list causes him to break up with his fiance and seek out the other women. He resigns himself to doing what the list says, at one point having sex with a crazy homeless woman and a man just because it says he will.
• The bank insolvency example was mentioned in Sneakers.
• In Star Trek (2009), Nero boasts that James T. Kirk will never become the hero that history remembered him as because Nero would kill him first like he did his father. Ironically, Nero's deeds are PRECISELY what leads to Kirk becoming a hero; in fact, he might've accelerated it!
• Star Wars:
  • The Jedi Order on their negative opinion of Anakin Skywalker. Since they first meet Anakin most of the Jedi have always seen darkness within him. They are not wrong about his flaws but they never did anything to help Anakin get better and often push his buttons every chance they got. Anakin also had very few friends within the Jedi Order.
  • The entire plot of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Anakin has visions of his wife dying in childbirth and turns to the dark side in an attempt to prevent it. Padmé actually comes through childbirth unharmed, but Anakin's betrayal causes her to lose the will to live and die. This was done to contrast with Luke later being confronted by the same sorts of troubling prophecies, but ultimately being able to Screw Destiny and avoid the path his father took.
  • The Last Jedi: Luke feared that his nephew, Ben Solo, would turn to the Dark Side, and so attempted to murder him in his sleep. He caught himself and changed his mind, but it was already too late. Ben woke up to see his uncle looming over him, lightsaber in hand, and so Ben attacked to defend himself, prompting his turn to the Dark Side and becoming Kylo Ren.
• Tell Me How I Die: An experimental drug gives people who use it visions of the future, including their own (violent) deaths at the hands of a killer stalking the testing facility. It's left ambiguous whether people can influence the visions they have or the visions influence the people having them, but the female lead eventually realizes that it works as a self-fulfilling prophecy because every character she told about the manner in which she saw them die ultimately do so in the exact way she described by trying to prevent it, while the only person that she didn't explicitly tell about hers died in a different manner than the vision predicted.
• In The Ten Commandments (1956), Pharoah Rameses I on advice from his High Priest Jannes orders the massacre of all Hebrew babies born at the time predicted that a Hebrew male would grow up to deliver his slave nation from bondage. It does not work, as the one surviving male baby Moses is secretly adopted by the pharaoh's own daughter Bithia to actually grow up to make the prophecy come true.
• Terminator:
  • In The Terminator, John Connor would not have been conceived if the T-800 hadn't traveled back in time and attempted to kill Sarah Connor, while Skynet wouldn't have been created if T-800 hadn't traveled back in time and attempted to kill Sarah Connor. Thus, Skynet created both itself and its greatest enemy.
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in general puts forth the idea that it's not so much a self-fulfilling prophecy anyway, but a kind of predestination... Judgment Day will always happen, and there will always be a human Resistance that rises up to fight it. It's the details such as the date of Judgment Day and who leads the Resistance (and whether the Resistance wins) that can be changed. All we know is that at some point, John Connor got conceived and added into the temporal shuffle, at which point his own actions formed a Stable Time Loop assuring he'd be born.
• In Thor: Ragnarok, the eponymous prophecy of Asgard's destruction at Ragnarok couldn't have been fulfilled if the heroes didn't know about it... because they actively invoked it to Summon Bigger Fish.
• 12 Monkeys. Not the cataclysm itself, but the protagonist's vision of someone dying. And La Jetée, the short French New Wave film it was based on.
• In Wanted the Loom of Fate causes Sloan to fall into this. The loom marks Sloan for death, but Sloan is the only one who interprets the loom's coded marks, so he simply hides it away and manufactures targets to make money as well as shape the world as he sees fit. In the end, the loom also marks the entire Chicago Fraternity for death; one tries to say Screw Destiny but is killed by the Action Girl just after, who kills herself with the same bullet, in the same shot, as her name is on the list. Though Sloan survives this scene, his attempt to turn the Fraternity into assassins for money and his failure to succeed allow the main character to survive and kill him in the very next scene.
• In Willow, the local evil sorceress tries to kill the infant prophesied to be her downfall, inadvertently rallying all her enemies to try and protect the child, ultimately leading to the sorceress's defeat. In addition to that, in the end, she ends up destroying herself with the very spell she was going to use to destroy the child.