Accidentally Correct Writing / Live-Action Films

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Accidentally-Correct Writing in Films — Live-Action.

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• Back to the Future:
  • Back to the Future Part II predicted that the Chicago Cubs would win the 2015 World Series. They were one year off, and they also predicted that Miami would get a professional baseball team. Their predictions weren't perfect, though — the baseball team Miami would get about five years after the film's release is a National League team, not an American League team, so they couldn't play the Cubs in the World Series (though the Cubs and Marlins have played each other in the playoffs before), and while October 21 is about when the World Series would be ending in the 1980s, baseball's playoffs had expanded from 4 teams to 10 by 2015 in the real world, making October 21 way too early for the World Series to end (and it often hasn't even started by October 21). Interestingly enough, the Cubs did make the playoffs in 2015, but rather than win the World Series, they ended up getting knocked out of the playoffs in the NLCS, coincidentally losing that series on October 21.
  • Most of the technology in 2015 was deliberately Zeerust and not intended to be a plausible depiction of the future. That said, some of the gadgets we see are pretty close to ones that actually existed in the real 2015, such as video calls and being able to watch six channels at once (although you do both on the computer, rather than a TV), and machines that respond to voice commands. In a roundabout way, it predicted the since-discredited Web TV concept, which attempted to combine computers and television but never gained enough popularity and disappeared rather quickly. Smart TVs would revisit the concept but not until later.
  • In Part II, there's a holographic trailer for Jaws 19, as a Take That! to the poorly-received Jaws sequels, particularly Jaws: The Revenge, and a meta joke about the movie itself. In the real 2015, there was indeed a sequel to another Steven Spielberg movie: Jurassic World, the fourth film of the Jurassic Park film series.
  • In Back to the Future Part III, Buford Tannen's gang members take notice of Marty's Nike sneakers, pronouncing "Nike" as "Nee-Kay" ("What is that, some sort of Injun talk or something?"). While the pronunciation is meant to show how uneducated Tannen and his gang are, "Nee-kay" is actually much closer to the Ancient Greek pronunciation of "Nike" than the pronunciation of the shoe line is.
• Beyond the Valley of the Dolls: Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert based Z-Man on Phil Spector, even though neither one had ever met him. They were told later that they captured him very well. Considering Z-Man goes insane and massacres his party guests at the end, including shooting a woman in the mouth, and what later happened with Spector and Lana Clarkson, they captured him far more accurately than they could have imagined.
• A Christmas Prince: Various people have argued that Richard being adopted and the resulting succession crisis shouldn't actually be that big a problem—can't the king just make whoever he wants his heir? Short answer: almost certainly not. Most European monarchies in the 21st century are constitutional and the succession is determined by laws created by Parliament, not by the sovereign. These laws tend to be very strict, slow to change (some of them still place sons ahead of daughters), and extremely clear that any heir to the throne must be biologically related to the sovereign. What suggests this is Accidentally-Correct Writing instead of just Shown Their Work is that the whole thing is overturned by a secret royal decree.
• Everybody remembers that iconic gag in A Christmas Story where Ralphie's father assumes that his new lamp is Italian after seeing the word "fragile" on the box and mistaking it for an Italian brand name. It's even funnier if you speak the language: the Italian word for "fragile" is spelled exactly like it is in English, and it's pronounced exactly like Ralphie's dad pronounces it ("frah-jee-lay").
• While A Clockwork Orange was incorrect in its assumption that mini-cassettes would become a popular audio medium, the record store filled with LPs would not look out of place today.
• Creed III: A Redditor questioned how Black and Nerdy Donnie could have a Naruto poster on his wall in 2002 when the anime didn't debut in the US until 2005. This was included as an Actor-Inspired Element by Michael B. Jordan, but it actually isn't completely out of the realm of possibility: the Naruto manga in fact began Japanese publication in 1999, and an English scanlation became available shortly after; it then became a launch title for the English version of Shonen Jump in January 2003. Donnie would just have needed to be extra Black and Nerdy to have gotten merch ahead of the official English launch, and his wealthy adoptive mother may have helped in that regard.
• Hamlet 2 revolves around the ensuing hilarity when a high school drama teacher attempts to write and produce a fan sequel to Hamlet, earning him the ire of theatre buffs who dismiss the idea as absurd. In fact, the idea of a Shakespeare play having a sequel isn't as ridiculous as it might sound: many of Shakespeare's plays did have sequels, complete with "Part 2" and "Part 3" in their titles (Henry IV, Part 2, Henry VI Part 2, and Henry VI Part 3 are among the most famous), and there's evidence that one of his "lost plays" may have been a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost called Love's Labours Won. Hamlet, however, probably wasn't one of those plays.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire marked the first time in the franchise that Dumbledore's wand had been shown, which was a unique prop created for the movies, with no input from J.K. Rowling. However, this was before the seventh book was written, which revealed said wand to actually be the Elder Wand, one of the titular Deathly Hallows, which was made from elder wood. The prop used in the movie was not only more ornate and distinctive than most other wands, but it even had decorative carvings that strongly resembled elderberries, so it fit perfectly with the plot of the book.
• The Interview: While originally done for the purposes of Rule of Cool and No Kill like Overkill, the protagonists' using the tank's cannon to shoot down Kim Jong-Un's helicopter isn't too far-fetched; US military tank crews are routinely trained to engage hostile helicopters with the tank's main gun as modern attack helicopters are unlikely to be brought down with machine gun fire except at very close range.
• In Jurassic Park III, Spinosaurus was portrayed as being larger than Tyrannosaurus rex and at that time it was believed to be the other way around (though some paleontologists already listed it as being longer than Tyrannosaurus, at 50 feet in length, but still not heavier). Later in 2006, Spinosaurus turned out to be not only larger than a T. rex but also the largest carnivorous dinosaur discovered up to that point. A bit of later evidence indicates that Spinosaurus was also aquatic, making the climactic scene where it rises out of the water while swimming also somewhat accurate. On the other hand, it's now thought that it had a paddle-shaped tail and its legs were shorter than they were in the movie, so it kind of breaks even.
• The Pyroraptor from Jurassic World Dominion is notably depicted as a capable swimmer. While it seems odd that a film franchise that treats dinosaurs as fantasy monsters would give this treatment to a dinosaur whose name literally means "fire thief", one study from 2019 found Pyroraptor. to be a member of the unenlagiines, a group of bird-like dinosaurs (e.g. Austroraptor, Buitreraptor) thought to have been semi-aquatic. The same study also finds halszkaraptorines, which were capable swimmers, to be close relatives of unenlagiines, suggesting that the real Pyroraptor was at least partially aquatic as well.
• A Knight's Tale: When William notices the Nike logo on the suit of armor that Kate gives him, Kate says it's in case some other knight should admire her handiwork. By the directors' own admission, as stated in their commentary on the DVD, they had no idea at the time that one of the founders of Nike was, in fact, a Knight.
• In Quatermass and the Pit (1967), the protagonists uncover remains of primitive humans from five million years ago. The characters state that no such remains have ever been found that far back in time before. At the time, the oldest known hominids were three million years-old members of the genus Australopithecus, but in 1994, a newly discovered five million years-old hominid, Ardipithecus, was announced.
• Carnosaur is an unashamedly cheesy B-movie ripoff of Jurassic Park, with none of the latter's attention to scientific detail. However, it managed to beat the Jurassic Park franchise to the punch in one significant way. The movie's dinosaurs are created from the DNA of chickens, and they demonstrate this by having a baby Deinonychus hatch out in a truck full of chickens, bearing a coat of chicken-like feathers. Even though it wasn't meant to be realistic, this was still the first feathered dinosaur ever to appear in a movie.
• 20 Million Miles to Earth was notable for being one of the first movies to correctly describe Venus as a hot, inhospitable planet with a poisonous sulfur-filled atmosphere. Probes to the planet confirmed this...five years after the movie came out.
• The Nazi flying wing airplane in Raiders of the Lost Ark is a fictional design, albeit one partly inspired by the Horten Ho 229 (which didn't exist at the time the movie takes place, and was powered by jet engines rather than propellers). But there was another, much more obscure Nazi flying wing design that the filmmakers were presumably unaware of — and it looked almost exactly like the one in the movie.
• Some have questioned the credibility of the fact that Captain Englehorn in King Kong (1933) is able to translate the language of the islanders, who have apparently never had Western visitors before. He describes it as similar to the language of the Nias islanders. Nias is a real place in Indonesia, but the language of the film is completely fabricated. Nonetheless, Englehorn's ability to translate is not all that implausible. Many of the languages of the Pacific share common enough roots to be mutually intelligible to fluent speakers.
• This is Spın̈al Tap goes for a Sophisticated as Hell gag by having one of the band members describe his song as being influenced by Bach and Mozart, only to reveal that it's entitled "Lick My Love Pump". Such a title would, in fact, have precedent in Mozart's oeuvre, which contains a vocal canon named "Leck Mich im Arsch" (in German literally "lick me in the arse", or "kiss my ass"). Also, many heavy metal musicians are classically trained, which may surprise people who think the genre is all about noise and Satanism.
• Stanley Kubrick and the Doctor Strangelove production team got themselves in trouble with the U.S. Air Force because their interior sets for the B-52 bomber were suspiciously accurate, even though the plane's layout was classified. The filmmakers had started with the appearance of a WWII-era B-29 flight deck, along with a single photograph from a book cover, and simply expanded it based on the B-52's exterior dimensions (a reasonable assumption given that both planes were Boeing products). Evidently they did an excellent job.
• Star Trek films:
  • Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home infamously featured "transparent aluminum", which sounds like a far-flung sci-fi concept if ever there was one, is not all that impossible, technically, since in 2015, Japanese researchers detailed a process to create super-strong glass with aluminum dust. And Gorilla Glass, that lovely substance that covers every smartphone on the planet contains aluminum too. And, transparent aluminum oxide — also known as synthetic sapphire — has been produced since the early part of the 20th century, including for industrial use of its extreme durability.
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country features a rather famous scene where Chancellor Gorkon claims that Hamlet was actually written by the Klingons ("You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him In the Original Klingon!"), which is why there's an officially licensed Klingon translation of Hamlet. While Shakespeare obviously wasn't secretly an alien, this is actually pretty close to the truth: Hamlet was not an original story, but (like virtually all of Shakespeare's works) was adapted from a much older work—namely, the Scandinavian saga of "Amleth", first written down by Danish scribe Saxo Grammaticus in the 12th century. Amusingly: from the 1980s onward, most portrayals of the Klingons in the Star Trek franchise are largely based on the modern romanticized image of Vikings. Meanwhile, many scholars believe that the 12th century saga of Amleth was based on an even older Norse legend—and in most versions of the story, Amleth and his father are Vikings. So the claim that Hamlet was a Klingon actually isn't that far off the mark.
• In 2010: The Year We Make Contact, when Dr. Heywood Floyd stands in the doorway of his sleeping son's room, on the wall to the left of his bed is a poster of an Olympic runner with the text "Beijing 08" on the bottom. The film was made in 1984 and the Olympic Committee did not choose Beijing for the 2008 Olympics until July 2001.
• In Blade Runner, when Batty and Tyrell are arguing about how to prolong a Replicant's lifespan, Batty mentions something called "EMS". Tyrell says they already tried "Ethyl methanesulfonate" unsuccessfully. Ethyl methanesulfonate is an actual organic compound with mutagenic qualities, used in genetics. The scriptwriter later admitted he did no research for the conversation and the mention of a real compound in the Techno Babble was coincidental.
• Demolition Man is a mixed bag, depending on how much leeway you want to give for hyperbole. However, a blink-and-you-miss-it moment near the beginning of the movie shows Scott Peterson as the name of an inmate incarcerated in the same cryogenic prison as antagonist Simon Phoenix. The movie was released in 1993. Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife in a highly-publicized trial in 2005. The judge in the case sentenced him to death, so putting him on ice is metaphorical in this instance.
• Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home planet in Star Wars: A New Hope, famously has two suns. At the time the Star Wars movies were written, binary star systems were thought of as too unstable to actually contain planets. In the early 1990s, astronomers theorized (and later confirmed) the existence of a planet in the binary star system PSR B1620-26, and today, it's known to be fairly common (e.g. Kepler-16b).
• The decision to use the Ford Taurus for the Detroit Police Department in RoboCop (1987) was because the car looked futuristic. Some years later, police departments would use Tauruses for cars.
• In one of the most famous scenes from The Blues Brothers, the brothers go on a car chase through a shopping mall (which in fact was a real shopping mall that had closed, fitted with fake storefronts). One of the stores they crash through is a Toys "R" Us (never a tenant of the actual mall). While no traditional enclosed mall at the time had a Toys "R" Us in it, the chain would later open a few such locations in The '80s and The '90s. They would also open the only 2 locations in 2019 after coming out of bankruptcy; sadly they closed in 2021 due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• In Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a person getting shot in the head can be treated using "Alpha Gel", before bringing the body back to the base and applying nanomachines to fix the brain. Just one year later, scientists come up with this making the brain-repairing gel a reality...sort of.
• Harold Ramis was apparently told by a parapsychologist that Slimer from Ghostbusters was a great portrayal of a "hungry ghost". Ramis said he had no idea such a thing was genuine folklore.
• M*A*S*H (and its television spinoff) featured a Black surgeon until people pointed out the anachronism that the US Army wasn't racially integrated until 1954. However, the Real Life 8055th MASH, which inspired the series, actually did have a Black surgeon on staff, whom the producers of the show were completely unaware of, as individual cases of integration had been occurring on occasion since before even 1940.
• The Room (2003) attempted to have one of the main characters named after the actor from The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon but Tommy Wiseau remembered his name as "Mark Damon". While he was not in that movie, as it turns out, there really is an actor who goes by the name Mark Damon.
• Welcome Mr. Marshall! was originally set in an Andalusian village named Villar del Río, which people kept mistaking for another called Villar del Campo. In the last version of the script, the setting was moved to a Castilian village that pretended to be Andalusian for added hilarity. Turns out there is an actual village named Villar del Río in Soria Province, in Castile, and that there is another named Villar del Campo just one hour's drive from it.
• Who Killed Bambi?, which would have been a Russ Meyer-directed film about the Sex Pistols, would have ended with Johnny Rotten Breaking the Fourth Wall by looking into the camera and asking, "Ever get the feeling you're Being Watched?" Rotten would end the Pistols' final concert, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, CA on January 14, 1978, by asking the crowd, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Good night," dropping the mic and walking offstage.
• In The Rock, John Mason, the only man to escape Alcatraz Prison, helps Navy SEALs infiltrate a captured Alcatraz Island using little-known tunnels and passageways. In 2014, researchers had discovered hidden tunnels and even buildings dating back to the Civil War similar to those seen in the film.
• WarGames depicts the Defcon system accurately, with Defcon 5 meaning "lowest state of readiness" and Defcon 1 meaning "highest state or readiness" (or "World War III", as McKittrick puts it), but according to Word of God, they thought they had it backwards.
• Titanic (1997):
  • Jonny Phillips (Second Officer Charles Lightoller) notably improvised the line "Get back, I say! Or I'll shoot you all like dogs!" By coincidence, that line was pretty close to actual history: according to at least one primary source, Fifth Officer Harold Lowe (played by Ioan Gruffudd in the film) really did say "If any man jumps into that boat, I will shoot him down like a dog!" during the evacuation of the Titanic.
  • Jack Dawson is completely fictional—but as it turns out, there actually are records of a "J. Dawson" among the third class passengers on the Titanic. The filmmakers were apparently unaware of this when they made the movie.
• While the James Bond films present a highly romanticized portrayal of modern espionage that bears little resemblance to the real thing, they include a few details that are more accurate than you might think. One of the biggest is that Bond openly uses his real name rather than a codename ("The name's Bond. James Bond."). In fact: most modern intelligence operatives don't bother to use cover identities for fieldwork, since they need to anticipate the possibility of background checks; a background check will almost immediately expose a false identity as fake, since it won't have a background.
• The 1977 horror/suspense film Orca: The Killer Whale is often mocked for an early scene where the titular whale attacks and kills a great white shark; the scene is generally believed to have been a Take That! to Jaws (which was released two years earlier by a rival studio), to which Orca was made in response. Despite this, however, it actually has some basis in fact: orcas are apex predators, and there's ample evidence that they prey on numerous species of sharks—including great whites. According to some scientific accounts, in fact, great whites have such an instinctive fear of orcas that they often flee from them on sight.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show uses "a laser capable of emitting a beam of pure antimatter" as an over the top parody of B-Movie technobabble. Many years later, scientists discovered a way to use lasers to generate a beam of positrons (antimatter): https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-figured-out-how-we-could-make-antimatter-out-of-light
• Total Recall (1990) shows Mars as shrouded in a dark, crepuscular red light, diffused by a thick red fog in the atmosphere. In the final scene, when the reactor pumps the atmosphere full of oxygen, the lighting becomes more intense, more natural, shining over a canyon of brown rock formations and a blue(ish) sky. The latter look is pretty close to what the surface of Mars actually looks like with the proper color correction, as revealed in 2004 (14 years after the movie was released) by the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (pre-existing pictures by past landers were instead unbalanced towards red). Instead, the red twilight look is closer to the actual look of Titan, as revealed by the Huygens lander in 2005 (15 years after the movie).

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