Two of the first pieces of fiction set in the future were Francis Cheynell’s Aulicus: His Dream of the King’s Second Coming to London in 1644 and Epigone, Histoire du Siècle Futur by Jacques Guttin in 1659. The former of these was an anti-royalist political tract. Guttin’s novel lacks the ‘otherness’ that a future setting typically brings with it, and would not be prevalent in works using flash forwards for another century.
We are not going to concern ourselves with genre though. Our focus is on two main questions: how far into the future should you set your movie, and is there an optimal time period to use?
The rules.
We are using IMDB ratings as our metric for success. We have excluded any film that was not set at least one year hence from its release year. This means that 1984 (1984) misses out. For films that cover a range of time periods we look at the earliest and latest years separately.
Pushing Forward.
The film set the largest number of years hence from its release date in our dataset is My Future Boyfriend (2011), which takes place in 3127. It performs above the trend, with an IMDB average rating of 5.5. The coefficient of correlation between the number of years set into the future and average rating is -0.18, which suggests a weak correlation between these values. There are some movies outperforming the trend between the 600 to 800 years ahead points, but our dataset is very light there. Using the later years doesn’t establish a link either, bringing the coefficient to almost zero.
I’ve been to the Year 3000.
Although we haven’t been able to establish a causal link between year and rating, we can look at the relative popularity of time periods with with writers. Our histogram shows that the time period between 1972 and 2051 contains the largest number of films in our dataset. We can narrow down further and find that 2019 is the most popular year to set a movie, with 253 films from our list being set in that year.
2019 isn’t the year with the highest average rating however. That accolade belongs to 2049, with an 8.0 rating. That rating isn’t an average, as the film in question is Blade Runner 2049.
Back to the question.
So with a sample size of one it would be unwise to lean too much on the year 2049 Let’s stick with 2019 and look at how far the films set in that year went into their futures.
The most frequent number of years to set your movie ahead is the 1–21 range. So, the answer to our original question is between 1 to 21 years from when you write it. That means if you’re writing something that will be released in 2021, then set it somewhere in the range of 2022 to 2042.
Sources:
- A. Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 2005.
- List of Films Set in the Future: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_set_in_the_future
- IMDB datasets: https://www.imdb.com/interfaces/
Want to explore the data yourself? Check out the Power BI file:
