7 iconic movies from the 60s and 70s that actually predicted how society would unravel

The 60s and 70s were a period of tremendous social upheaval and cultural questioning.

Filmmakers were grappling with Vietnam, civil rights, Watergate, environmental destruction, and rapidly changing technology. They were asking uncomfortable questions about where society was heading.

What's striking is how many of their darker predictions have come to pass. Not in the literal sci-fi sense of flying cars and moon bases, but in the ways they depicted human nature, institutional corruption, media manipulation, and social breakdown.

These films weren't trying to be prophetic. They were responding to currents they saw in their own time. But by extrapolating those trends and exploring them through narrative, they ended up mapping trajectories that would take decades to fully manifest.

Watching these movies now feels eerie. The dystopias they imagined don't seem like fantasies anymore. They seem like documentaries from slightly alternate timelines, or warnings we should have heeded more seriously.

Here are seven films from that era that predicted, with uncomfortable accuracy, how society would unravel.

1) Network (1976) - Media as spectacle and manipulation

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

That line became iconic, but the real prophecy in Network was about what would happen when news became entertainment and outrage became a business model.

The film depicts a struggling news network that discovers they can boost ratings by turning their anchor's on-air breakdown into programming. Mental illness, rage, and spectacle become content. Truth becomes secondary to engagement.

Sound familiar? Network predicted reality television, outrage-driven news cycles, the blurring of journalism and entertainment, and the monetization of anger. It saw that once media companies realized they could profit from emotional manipulation rather than information, they would abandon any pretense of serving the public interest.

The movie shows a society where people are so mediated, so constantly fed narratives, that they lose the ability to distinguish reality from performance. Where corporate interests shape what counts as news. Where authentic emotion gets packaged and sold back to audiences as content.

Decades before social media algorithms learned to maximize engagement through anger and fear, Network showed exactly how and why that would happen. The specific technology changed, but the underlying dynamic it predicted is now our daily reality.

2) The Graduate (1967) - Alienation and meaninglessness of success

The Graduate captured something essential about post-war prosperity's emptiness.

Benjamin Braddock returns from college to wealthy suburban California and finds himself completely alienated. He's achieved everything he was supposed to achieve, but nothing means anything. His parents' generation insists he should be grateful and ambitious, but he can't connect with their vision of success.

The film predicted the widespread disillusionment with traditional markers of achievement that would define subsequent generations. The sense that climbing the ladder leads nowhere meaningful. That material success doesn't deliver the fulfillment it promises.

It also captured the generational disconnect that would only deepen. Parents unable to understand why their children aren't grateful for opportunities. Young people unable to articulate why achieving what they're "supposed" to achieve feels hollow.

The famous final scene, where Benjamin and Elaine escape together on a bus, shows initial euphoria dissolving into uncertainty. They've rejected the life laid out for them, but they have no idea what comes next. That ambivalence about opting out of conventional success while having no clear alternative has become defining for multiple generations since.

3) Soylent Green (1973) - Environmental collapse and inequality

Set in 2022, Soylent Green depicts a world where environmental destruction and resource depletion have created extreme inequality and social breakdown.

The wealthy live in isolated luxury while masses of people struggle for basic necessities. Natural food is impossibly expensive. The ocean is dead. The climate is wrecked. Overcrowding and poverty are overwhelming cities.

While we're not quite at the dystopian extreme the film depicts, the trajectory it predicted is undeniably accurate. Growing inequality with the wealthy increasingly isolated from everyone else. Environmental degradation affecting the poor first and worst. Climate crisis creating resource scarcity. The sense that systems are breaking down while those with power refuse to make necessary changes.

The film's central metaphor about people literally consuming each other to survive isn't subtle. But it captured something true about how societies respond to scarcity: by sacrificing the vulnerable to maintain comfort for the privileged.

What's most chilling is the film's depiction of normalized horror. People accept conditions that should be unacceptable because the alternative has become unimaginable. That acceptance of deteriorating conditions as the new normal feels increasingly familiar.

4) A Clockwork Orange (1971) - Violence, control, and lost humanity

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess's novel explored what happens when society responds to violence and chaos with authoritarian control that strips away free will.

The film depicts youth violence and social breakdown, but its real insight is about the cure being worse than the disease. When the state uses psychological conditioning to eliminate Alex's capacity for violence, it eliminates his capacity for choice altogether. He becomes a thing, not a person.

This predicted the ways societies would respond to crisis by embracing surveillance, control, and punishment that ultimately dehumanizes everyone involved. The film asked whether a society that removes people's ability to choose evil has actually solved anything or just created a different kind of horror.

We see this playing out in mass incarceration, surveillance capitalism, and the increasing willingness to sacrifice freedom for security. The film understood that the impulse to control and contain perceived threats would lead to systems that diminish everyone's humanity.

It also captured the aestheticization of violence that would become pervasive in media, and the desensitization that follows. The way brutality becomes entertainment and spectacle rather than something that genuinely disturbs us.

5) The Conversation (1974) - Surveillance and paranoia

Before Watergate fully unfolded, Francis Ford Coppola made a film about surveillance, privacy invasion, and institutional paranoia.

Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who becomes consumed by the ethical implications of his work and the ways it can be weaponized. The film shows how surveillance technology enables control and how knowing you're being watched changes behavior.

This was made before personal computers, before the internet, before smartphones and social media. Yet it predicted the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism we now inhabit. The ways our communications are monitored and recorded. How that data gets used for control and profit. The paranoia that comes from never knowing who's watching or how information will be used against you.

The film also captures the complicity of people who build these systems while telling themselves they're just doing a job. The moral distance that lets someone facilitate surveillance by claiming they're not responsible for how it gets used.

Most prophetically, it shows how surveillance doesn't just observe reality. It changes it. People behave differently when they know or suspect they're being monitored. Privacy isn't just about hiding wrongdoing. It's essential to authentic human interaction and freedom of thought.

6) Easy Rider (1969) - Freedom versus conformity

Easy Rider is often remembered as a celebration of counterculture freedom. But its real insight was darker: society violently rejects those who genuinely opt out.

Two men ride motorcycles across America seeking freedom and authentic experience. They encounter kindness and beauty, but also hostility and ultimately murderous violence from people threatened by their lifestyle.

The film predicted the culture war dynamics that would intensify over subsequent decades. The way certain choices about how to live get read as attacks on others' values. The violence, symbolic and literal, directed at those who reject conventional paths.

It captured the paradox of American freedom: it's celebrated in abstract but punished in practice. The men aren't hurting anyone, but their mere existence as people living differently is treated as threatening enough to warrant elimination.

The famous ending, where they're casually murdered by passing motorists, showed that seeking freedom outside approved channels can be dangerous. That there are people so threatened by alternative ways of living that they'll destroy them given the chance.

This predicted not just ongoing culture wars but the way difference itself gets weaponized and treated as existential threat rather than just alternative choice.

7) Seconds (1966) - The emptiness of reinvention

This less-known film is perhaps the most unsettling on the list.

A middle-aged man, dissatisfied with his suburban existence, pays a mysterious organization to fake his death and give him a new identity, new face, and new life as an artist. He gets everything he thought he wanted: youth, freedom, creativity, escape from obligations.

And he's still miserable. Because the problem wasn't his circumstances. It was him.

The film predicted our culture's obsession with reinvention as solution to existential dissatisfaction. The belief that if we just change our external circumstances, we'll finally be happy. The self-help industry, the wellness culture, the constant pursuit of transformation.

It showed that running from yourself doesn't work because you take yourself with you. That external changes can't solve internal emptiness. That the grass isn't actually greener, it's just different grass.

Most disturbingly, it predicted how capitalism would monetize that dissatisfaction. How industries would emerge promising transformation, reinvention, and escape from yourself. How people would pay enormous amounts for the fantasy that becoming someone else would solve their problems.

Final thoughts

What makes these films powerful isn't just that they predicted specific outcomes.

It's that they understood the underlying dynamics: how systems prioritize profit over people, how fear drives authoritarian responses, how technology enables control, how prosperity doesn't guarantee meaning, how societies sacrifice the vulnerable when stressed.

We had warnings. Artists and filmmakers were showing us where things were heading. The tragedy isn't that the future was unpredictable. It's that it was predicted, and we built it anyway.

Perhaps the question now is whether we're willing to look at contemporary art that's showing us where we're heading next, and whether we'll make different choices this time. Though if history is any indication, we probably won't. We'll call it entertainment, miss the warnings, and then act surprised when the dystopia arrives right on schedule.