By Brian Boone
Happy New Year! What does 2025 have in store? If some self-proclaimed psychics and science-fiction movies from the past are correct, it’s certainly going to be an interesting year. Here are some of the most far-fetched predictions on record about what might (but probably won’t) happen in the coming months.
Televised gladiator combats
According to the 1983 Italian B-movie Endgame, the New York City of 2025 is a radiation-saturated but still very crowded and bustling post-apocalyptic nightmare world ruled by mind-reading mutants, packs of scavenging hordes, and the wealthy. They keep everyone in place with a reality show about gladiator fights called Endgame.
The first of many final wars
Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, aka Baba Vanga, was beset with many predictions during her lifetime. The blind Bulgarian mystic died in 1996, but she left many premonitions about the years she didn’t see. According to Baba Vanga’s followers, some interpretations of her cryptic prophecies line up with the events of 9/11 and the Ukraine War, and she’s got bad news for 2025. While she said the beginnings of the end times would start with a nuclear war in 2023, humanity will begin the final apocalypse in 2025 with a war enveloping the whole of Europe. That will escalate and wipe us all out in the year 5079.
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The sport of the future is the sport of the present
Per the 1998 ABC made-for-TV movie Futuresport, starring Lois and Clark’s Dean Cain and singer Vanessa Williams, 2025 is a big year for Futuresport. It’s the most popular spectactor sport in what was once the United States, played on both hoverboards and inline skates that combines elements of hockey, baseball, and basketball. Effectively used as a way to decrease the gang violence that overtook American life, the powers that be use a Futuresport tournament between warring factions the North American Alliance and the Pan-Pacific Commonwealth. The winner gets what used to be called Hawaii, which has been taken over by the terrorists of the Hawaiian Liberation Organization.
This is what’s new, pussycat
Tana Hoy, who markets herself as the “world’s foremost psychic,” made a bold prediction about the future of pop music. The top “new” star of 2025 will be ‘60s crooner Tom Jones. Beginning in late 2024, the now 84-year-old Welsh singer will make efforts to appeal to the youth market and he’ll be widely embraced. Also, Hoy promises, scientists will announce that they’ve been developed a cure for the misunderstood pain-centered disease fibromyalgia.
It’s the year of the zebra
In this 2010 movie set in 2025, Tokyo is ruled by the evil but elected governor Aihara Kozou, who renames the metropolis “Zebra City.” He then creates “Zebra Time,” a program in which a five-minute period beginning at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. means that all crime is briefly legal. The caveat is that Zebra Police can attack any criminals during that time. Looking to stop Governor Kozou’s madness, and prevent a worldwide adoption of Zebra Time, is a superhero who calls himself “Zebraman.”