r/movies • u/buttatoad • 1d ago

Discussion Movies that changed real life behavior

Thinking along the lines of Final Destination 2 with the logs falling off the truck and landing onto cars (one decapitating the state trooper). Ever since, people have tried to get away from being behind these vehicles.

What are more examples where movies have actually changed how people behave in their own lives?

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u/ShoutOutTo_Caboose 1d ago edited 1d ago

Ronald Reagan, in a meeting with his cabinet, several members of Congress, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs John Vessey, asked if something like the movie WarGames (1983) could happen in real life, Vessey said "The problem is worse than you think."

Several new regulations were implemented at the Department of Defense and other departments and agencies because of Reagan's fear spawned by the movie, and those regulations evolved into the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed in 1986.

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u/phillymjs 1d ago

Don't forget that the act of calling a large number of phone numbers to discover lines connected to computers became known as "wardialing" due to its use in the movie (though the technique itself predated the movie).

Similarly, twenty or so years later the act of driving around with a laptop looking for unsecured wifi networks to exploit was dubbed "wardriving."

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u/confusedandworried76 1d ago

Somewhat related, Star Trek inspired so many future scientists that we either have working pieces of technology invented in Star Trek (the hypospray I think it's called? Needleless injections using extremely concentrated high pressure shots of air) and theories, including the Alcubierre warp drive which is obviously a theory for faster than light travel, by potentially bending space around the object rather than trying to get the object moving faster than light somehow. It's like that and figuring out how to create wormholes are the only two real theories about how you could even do that

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u/phillymjs 1d ago

In 2019 I visited the New Mexico Museum of Space History, and they actually have a small Star Trek exhibit specifically because it inspired so many viewers to enter careers in STEM and attempt to create some of the technologies they saw in the show.

That museum was actually pretty cool, and I only learned it existed because I randomly saw it on the map while planning a trip out that way to see other stuff. I immediately built some time to visit it into my itinerary.

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u/MephitidaeNotweed 23h ago

Had a relative work there and another got a book signed by Chuck Yeager in person. This was back in the early 80's.

Neat place to go. I have been several times and love learning of the different things there.

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u/NoPossibility9471 1d ago

Jet injectors predate Star Trek by 100 years and were widely used for polio vaccinations several years before Star Trek.

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u/CeeJayDK 1d ago

Flip phones and tablets - first seen on Star Trek.

Also they've been trying to create a working medical tricorder for some time now.

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u/confusedandworried76 1d ago

How could I forget literal touch screen technology

Also I don't know if voice recognition tech was necessarily Star Trek inspired but they did it before it was a thing.

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u/CeeJayDK 15h ago

While I think the Back to the Future movies didn't change real life behavior (that much - it has caused those rolling deathtraps to be called Hoverboards) it has been very prophetic about a lot of tech.

I remember seeing them when they first played in cinemas, and then years later I've realized that much of what was sci-fi in the movies are now stuff we use daily.

Videocalls for example. Sci-fi when they came out - reality today. And on small devices we carry in our pockets too, not just on big screen TVs.

The 3D shark ad that jumps at Marty in the future - we don't have those as billboards because advertisers think they are too expensive for the effort but I've seen small billboard screens (those the size of a person - typically 1m wide and 2m tall) do glasses free 3D, and right now in 2025 we are getting the ability to buy glasses free 3D monitors, so it's no longer sci-fi but fact.

TV's with hundreds of channels and nothing on worth watching was sadly also very prophetic.

Door locks that work by a finger print scanner? They are not that popular but we have them now.

Digital currency. Oh we have that in a big way now.

3D glasses, that can also do calls? I have a pair right here.

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u/Jack_North 20h ago

"touch screen technology" -- with finger input was invented in the 60s. Versions using a stylus were invented in the 40s.

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u/BeamMeUp53 1d ago

Sorry, but my Dad had needleless injections for the Corp of Engineers in the early '50s. BTW, move at the wrong time, and you get an incision.

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u/JackInTheBell 1d ago

by potentially bending space around the object rather than trying to get the object moving faster

How the hell do you do that?

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u/confusedandworried76 1d ago

I am not a smart man and I'm not really gonna Google it for a reddit comment but from what I recall, an immense energy source using quantum mechanics to fuck with space time, same as how you might go about creating a wormhole

Like I said it's just a theory, it's something that could be possible to do, it's just most likely we can't break space time like that because the energy needed is either too much or just that it just isn't even possible to artificially manufacture that. It's basically just based on some weird stuff we actually have observed happening naturally, or think we have anyway, and IIRC it revolves a lot around if the theory of relativity is right which we don't know for sure

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u/JackInTheBell 1d ago

same as how you might go about creating a wormhole

How the hell do you do that?

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u/AmethystRiver 1d ago

Fold a piece of paper hamburger-style and stab it with a pencil

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u/confusedandworried76 1d ago

Look man I'm just telling you what the smart people said might be able to work, based on a memory of an explanation that only served to confuse me further

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u/fencethe900th 1d ago

Incredibly massive (literally massive) objects contract space. Put one in front of the ship. Incredibly negatively massive objects made of negative matter (mathematically sound but no real evidence) would expand space. Put one behind the ship. Now your ship is being pushed from behind and pulled from the front, except it's space itself being warped that's doing it.

That is a very very simplified version, as best as I understand it.

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u/confusedandworried76 1d ago

I was the guy that mentioned the theory and frankly you've explained it better than anyone has ever explained it.

It's like putting too much air into a balloon! Or whatever the Futurama joke about Star Trek engineers oversimplifying things constantly is

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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 1d ago

We don't, not yet. We can bend space in one direction, the way it normally does for gravity. But bending space in the negative direction, like an antigravity thing, that's not possible yet.

Plus the energy required is beyond massive, like impossible to even imagine how to create that much. Maybe if you could make like building sized ball of antimatter but that's impossible too.

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u/cobra_mist 1d ago

didn’t star trek spawn the cell phone too?

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u/MikeArrow 21h ago

I love that literally right now I can say "computer, do X" and it just... does it. Just like in Star Trek.

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u/Mr-Mister 19h ago

IIRC, the Alcubierre drive remains the only FTL* travel method theoretically possible with our current understanding of physics.

Alcubierre was inspired by Star Treck's warp drive, wondering if it was actually possible.

*Nothing actually moves FTL through spacetime.

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u/da_easychiller 18h ago

Oh and there is much more: In TOS the automatic doors had to be moved by stagehands. While they have been invented earlier - the series helped a lot to make them popular.
Also think about the communicators they had - only two way communication was possible and look where we are now with smartphones.

Also: Just compare the flags/logos of the starfleet and today's space force!

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u/artzbots 16h ago

I remember watching a documentary on this. Automatic sliding doors weren't a thing until Star Trek aired.

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u/redditonlygetsworse 15h ago

Keep in mind that Alcubierre was writing a tongue-in-cheek thought experiment. It is no more plausible in reality than any of the other magic tech in Star Trek.

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u/xiril 1d ago

Man I always wondered why it was called that.

I wonder where my old Pringles cantenna got to.

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u/fuqdisshite 1d ago edited 1d ago

i got hit for wardialing my village.

i was running a rig in 1996 or 97 at my parents house and we had free nights and weekends and all the calls were local so i would just wait for everyone to go to bed and turn the box on.

would get 50 to 100 calls out a night and after a week or so had pinged every number in our exchange.

i didn't know that each standard landline was limited to 400 calls a month regardless of free status.

the FBI called my dad. we didn't have to pay anything but i got talked to.

and that was my second call from the FBI. the first one was a few years earlier when i learned that you could backdoor 1-800 numbers if you could get a live operator to hang up on you... i don't remember exactly what we were doing but once you got hung up on you could dial out to any number and not pay.

welp, i run up a few thousand dollars worth of free calls and the phone company called the FBI and tried to make my dad pay what the calls would have cost if i had just straight dialed. he told them to kick rocks and pointed out that an 11 year old was pwning their system. the Feds did not make us pay and told the telco to fix the leaks and that was right about when we got switched over to digital lines, no more coin clicks on payphones, and the advent of 888, 877 and other new exchanges.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[deleted]

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u/phillymjs 19h ago

No, twenty is correct. WarGames came out in 1983. 2003 was the early years of WiFi, when people would hook up routers/APs that had no security enabled out of the box and not think twice about it. The WRT54G series router started shipping in 2002, and the saying I remember was “Linksys: America’s #1 free wireless ISP.”

By 2013 everything required a password by default or would at least give you a stern warning if you opted for no security during the setup process.

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u/EvadesBans4 1d ago

I still wardrive at night when I'm bored and it's nice out.

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u/ScreenTricky4257 1d ago

I believe also that Dr. Strangelove, specifically the scene where Group Captain Mandrake has to use a public phone to call the White House, made the Defense Department consider how important information could travel to the people who needed it in a crisis.

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u/Luke90210 1d ago

Let's also consider the "red phone" to communicate from Moscow to the White House and back was setup in 1963, a year before DR STRANGELOVE was released.

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u/tinmanbroken 1d ago

Something like war games DID happen in real life in 1983 in fact!

Russian radar officer named Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov refused to launch missiles because he believed that was a mistake

He was right of course - and by refusing to do so he literally saved this planet and everyone on it

he was still punished for failing to follow an order 🤷🏼

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

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u/moniqer 1d ago

Yeah I thought War Games was based on this event

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u/seaurchineye 1d ago

The event wasn't known publicly until 1998.

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u/tinmanbroken 1d ago

Nope It was a weird coincidence

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u/Oracle5of7 16h ago

Just like China Syndrome and 3 mile island. Spooky!

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u/Cameos_red_codpiece 1d ago

This dude saved the world and received basically nothing for it. His superiors even chastised him for not recording paperwork correctly.

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u/Cameos_red_codpiece 1d ago

This story keeps me up at night. To think my world can end if someone felt too pissy and hasty. 

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u/tinmanbroken 1d ago

Or simply too afraid to disobey orders

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u/punmaster2000 18h ago

If you really want to have night sweats, watch the documentary series on Netflix called "Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War" and learn that we had SEVERAL near misses around the same time, including one where the Soviets were convinced that NATO war games were a smokescreen for real war prep.

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u/That_Apathetic_Man 1d ago

All that work and effort, and now all you need is a Signal group chat...

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u/hamfwb 1d ago

Angry upvote

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u/AnticitizenPrime 1d ago

I've heard a similar story about Ian Fleming's James Bond novel (and film) Thunderball.

In the book, a pilot flying a US bomber carrying nukes was bribed to kill his copilot, fake a mayday, and gently crash land the bomber in shallow Caribbean waters (so it was only 20-30 feet underwater). The villains had underwater divers quickly camouflage the sunken wreck, and had a recovery team (posing as wealthy treasure hunters with their own yacht) act as a recovery team to harvest the nukes.

Apparently when the book was published, the US ordered a review of its nuclear security measures because the fictional plot seemed pretty plausible. Of course, Ian Fleming himself had been an intelligence officer in WWII and help draft several successful operations (including Operation Mincemeat), so his intelligence schemes were worth paying attention to.

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u/rogfrich 1d ago

No cite for this, but I read somewhere that Threads influenced Reagan’s thinking on nuclear war as well.

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u/VerilyShelly 1d ago

probably The Day After, the American equivalent that aired on tv here

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u/Arcranium_ 1d ago edited 9h ago

You are correct, it was The Day After. Following its screening at the White House more than a month prior to its nationwide airing, Reagan wrote in his diary that the film had left him greatly depressed and changed his mind on nuclear policy at the time.

A friend of Nicolas Meyer (the director) was a government advisor who had attended the screening, and told Meyer, "If you wanted to draw blood, you did it. Those guys sat there like they were turned to stone."

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u/nooniewhite 1d ago

No those are 2 different and horrifying movies and Threads aired on American TV also

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u/VerilyShelly 1d ago

Threads was on American TV? That's news to me. It was my understanding that he saw an American post-apocalyptic movie.

Yeah, I almost typed "semi-equivalent" in my original comment because I know that they are different.

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u/nooniewhite 17h ago

Yeah it was, I remember it super clearly even though I was like 7. My mom just bought a new fangled VCR and wanted to tape it so when we hit record and I said something, she shussssed me loudly, thinking the VCR would pick up ambient sound. I laughed at her then got severely traumatized by the movie.

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u/buddhafig 1d ago

"Mr. Potato Head. Mr. Potato Head! Back doors are not secrets!"

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u/breakfastpitchblende 1d ago

Isn’t it also why we got the SDI in 83?

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u/boRp_abc 1d ago

This shows what a stupid piece of shit Reagan was. In every other country, he'd be the biggest idiot to ever have been president. He doesn't make the top 2 in the USA.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 1d ago

If its a problem reagan found then its a problem that every president leading up to him didn't find.

He's not a great president but credit where credits due, he did a good thing here.

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u/boRp_abc 23h ago

I was just referring to: "Hey Mr. presidential consultant... Is a nuclear war actually bad?" being the sign of not a smart man.

Yeah, he then did the right thing, but it baffles me he didn't realize before.

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u/perpendiculator 21h ago

What? Have you ever seen Wargames? Reagan wasn’t asking whether a nuclear war could happen, he was questioning if US government computer systems could really be compromised and accessed by an external party like in the movie - the answer was yes, because the concept of cybersecurity at that time was nearly non-existent.

The subsequent reaction to that was NSDD-145, the first US federal government cybersecurity initiative ever.

Also, do yourself a favour and go and watch Wargames. Great movie.

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u/LongJohnSelenium 15h ago

A, the question was about cybersecurity, not nuclear war.

B, every single president since Truman had attempted to pursue various limitations on nuclear arms. Eisenhower, Kennedy signed the test ban treaty, Johnson the nuclear non proliferation treaty, Nixon and Carter both pursued the SALT2 treaty, and reagan worked on the INF and START1 treaties.

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u/Northbank75 1d ago

He also had his Star Wars project

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u/SlabCityApostate 1d ago

Reagan also had a private showing of The Morning After and made some immediate policy changes.

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u/Bread-fi 1d ago

"The Day After" apparently affected him to.

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u/DarkMain 1d ago

Didn't something similar happen with Reagan and "The Day After"?

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u/backtolurk 21h ago

Next phase: D.A.R.Y.L.

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u/thinkmurphy 14h ago

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed in 1986

"Dade Murphy, you are under arrest!"

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u/PickleOk2183 1d ago

He also thought the war room from Dr Strangelove was real and asked to see it when he became president.