When you think of movies and shows that predicted the future, your mind will probably go to something like Continuum, a sci-fi drama where heroes try to prevent a future where corporations are more powerful than governments and everyone has cybernetic implants in their bodies that can be hacked. And that’s very exciting, but maybe a little dramatic. A lot of those predictions still feel too far in the future to feel relevant.
There’s another movie, one that doesn’t even really quality as sci-fi, that did a better job of predicting our current reality than most hard sci-fi films: the 1998 drama The Truman Show.
How The Truman Show predicted our world (without meaning to)
Welcome to the exciting world of mass surveillance
The Truman Show is about a man named Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), a mild-mannered insurance salesman who lives a quiet life on Seahaven Island, state not named. He actually lives inside a giant soundstage, that everyone in his life is an actor (including his wife and best friend), and that every single moment of his life is broadcast 24/7 to over a billion fans around the world as part of The Truman Show.
The movie is about how Truman slowly starts to realize that something is wrong and with his life and tries to escape his confinement. It remains a good watch to this day, in part because of how prescient it was about aspects of our current world, often it ways it couldn’t predict.
For instance, Truman is recorded with over 5,000 cameras hidden around Seahaven. In 1998, the idea of outfitting the entire world with that kind of camera coverage would have seemed absurd, but in 2026 a lot of people move through life assuming that everything they do can be recorded. Between CCTV cameras, smartphones, and smart home devices that can be used to spy on people, privacy is becoming an outdated concept whether we like it or not, and advances in AI technology are likely going to make it even easier to usher in the age of mass surveillance.
The Truman Show predicted more than reality TV
Socia media brain before social media
But The Truman Show was most prescient when it came to media. The movie dropped after shows like Cops and The Real World were already on the air, but before massive hits like Survivor and Big Brother and long before the Real Housewives and Kardashian cinematic universes came into being. Reality TV scrambled the concept as we knew it, and The Truman Show saw it coming.
In fact, it saw further than it knew. When I watch The Truman Show now, I don’t see it foreshadowing reality TV; I see it foreshadowing influencer culture. As social media has become more and more prominent over the past 20 years, we’ve seen people willingly turn their lives into content to be consumed by strangers around the world, doing for themselves what the megalomaniacal producer Christof (Ed Harris) needed a whole team and a huge budget to do for the unsuspecting Truman. Influencers will advertise products during their live-streams or YouTube videos in more or less the same way that Truman’s wife Meryl (Laura Linney) tries to talk up cocoa beans to him, which often works better than traditional advertisements because these creators have built up trust with their audiences that they wouldn’t have with an ordinary commercial.
Like The Truman Show, this world of home-grown lifestyle content is available to watch 24/7. Christof had to manipulate people into forming a parasocial attachment to Truman, but now millions of people around the world do that for themselves, or aspire to.
The Truman Show is everywhere now
We’re the show
So The Truman Show accurately predicted that, in the future, there would be people who lived their lives in a performative way, for the benefit of others. But that ended up being far more wide-spread than I think anyone was expecting, since social media allowed so many people to indulge in it. The Truman Show is everywhere now, because we wanted it to be. On social media, engagement is the goal, and there’s a lot of people out there willing to do pretty much anything to get it.
There are also plenty of people, of course, who aren’t influencers, and many who aren’t on social media at all. Their lives aren’t performative. But when you combine that with the creeping sense that it’s impossible to avoid being surveilled these days how long will that last? If you know cameras are on you at all times, you may feel like you have to put on a show for the benefit of whoever might be watching lest your behavior be judged and possibly even punished, even if you’d prefer to be left alone.
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The Truman Show writer has a knack for predictions
The Truman Show has never gotten a remake or a sequel, although there have been a few pitches. It’s possible that’s because it would feel a little redundant. The show is all around us now.
The Truman Show was written by Andrew Niccol. Niccol also wrote and directed Gattaca, a movie set in the near future where widespread gene editing leads to a society where people are discriminated against based on their DNA sequence. As it happens, NASA once called that film the most realistic sci-fi movie ever made, so maybe that one is worth paying attention to as well, if we want to get a glipse of where we’re headed.
