In 1989, 'Back to the Future Part II' Envisioned the Year 2015 — Take a Look at What the Film Got Right and Wrong

In 1989, “Back to the Future Part II” envisioned the year 2015. When Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) traveled 30 years into the future to prevent his son’s future-altering arrest, he found a world filled with hoverboards, flying cars and other new technology. (Note: While the movie was made in 1989, the story takes place in 1985.)

As the New Year quickly is now imminent, Newsweek spoke to several “futurists” about what the cult classic got right — and wrong — about the year 2015.

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What the Movie Got Right

Futurist Michael Rogers pointed out that old electronics “had become antiques in 2015,” much like present day. He recalled how an Apple I from the 1970s sold for $360,000 at an auction.

Rogers also said biometrics, large screen home displays, video telephone calls are “three definite hits” from the movie.

“Skype and Facetime are part of everyday usage; by the end of the decade I think it will be totally natural for younger users to transition from text to audio to video in a single call, depending on the content at the moment,” he added.

Futurist Glen Hiemstra told Newsweek the movie did a great job predicting flat-screen TVs well ahead of their emergence.

“The thing they got really right was big flat wall screens everywhere that you could talk to. Those pretty much didn’t exist in the late ’80s. There were no flat screens,” he said.

Anne Lise Kjaer, another futurist, said she noticed how the “flat tablet” and “iPhone-style camera” in “Back to the Future Part II.”

What the Movie Got Very Wrong

The “number one thing” the movie got wrong about 2015 was the “dominance of fax machines,” according to Hiemstra.

“That’s characteristic of a common forecasting pitfall, which is to overestimate the importance of something that is dominant in the current time,” he explained. “Fax machines were relatively new in the late ’80s. So if you remember when Marty’s getting fired, there’s a fax coming in. And they refer to fax machines several times.”

Futurist Ross Dawson pointed out that the “fusion device” featured in the movie allowed people to get infinite energy, which “seems to be very different from where we are today.”

Rogers was quick to point out that things like flying cars and other big technology items have not progressed nearly as quickly as the movie envisioned:

Futurists have been predicting flying cars almost ever since the car itself was invented. But the barriers are big. In terms of basic design, flying vehicles need lift; cars shouldn’t have lift. In terms of driver skills, a car is basically two-dimensional navigation; an airplane is three dimensional. Big difference in the driving skill required. And finally, the FAA. Consider how cautious the regulators are being about drones, which weigh a few pounds and don’t carry passengers. Multiply that caution by, oh, about a million, and that’s how the regulators will respond to flying cars.

And, of course, the awesome hoverboards from the film haven’t quite materialized either.

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“I’ve thought about the hoverboard a lot, and what it would require, basically, is anti-gravity technology. In 2015 we won’t even have a complete theory of gravity,” Rogers said.

Hiemstra further recalled how the movie mentioned that lawyers had been abolished by 2015, which obviously hasn't happened and may have been just wishful thinking.

He continued: "They got the Cubs winning the World Series. With the Cubs’ new manager, maybe that'll come through. They never won the World Series. But they have hopes for 2015."

Newsweek also offers two caveats about the listicle:

Two caveats are necessary. First, as Zemeckis himself has acknowledged (in the director’s commentary on the film’s DVD/Blu-Ray), the goal was to make a funny and entertaining film, not “to make a scientifically sound prediction that we were probably going to get wrong.” Still, any fictional envisioning of the future offers a glimpse of what present-day writers hope or fear might come true, and in this case the film did recruit a handful of future consultants to help with the predictions. They got more right than they probably expected.

Second thing is, we’re not quite there yet. The Back to the Future sequel takes place primarily on October 21, 2015. In the journalistic interest of timeliness, we’re jumping the gun a little bit. If things change dramatically in the next 10 months, we’ll revisit this assessment. Hopefully we won’t disrupt the space-time continuum as much as Marty.

Read Newsweek’s full conversation with the futurists on this subject here.