Movies Like Minority Report: 4 Stories About Being Predicted
If Minority Report made you wonder what happens when a system claims to know what you'll do next, these are the films and episodes in our archive that explore the same fear, and how each has aged.
If you liked Minority Report, watch Gattaca next, then Devs, then the Black Mirror episode "Hang the DJ". Each asks the question Spielberg's film asks: what happens to a person when something claims to know their future before they've lived it. Gattaca does it with genes, Devs with physics, and "Hang the DJ" with dating.
It's worth being clear about what Minority Report got right and wrong, because it shapes which films feel like it. It was right about the gesture interfaces, the self-driving cars and the police computer that claims to see crime coming. It was wrong about how that last one would go. On our ledger, arresting people for crimes they haven't committed is marked DIVERGED: predictive policing was tried and, in the best-known cases, dropped after its makers failed to show it worked. The picks below are chosen for the same anxiety, and also for how the real world answered them.
Every work here is one we've reviewed, with a score, a Nearness reading and a ledger of its claims. For the film itself, read our review of Minority Report. For the argument about what the future did with prediction, read Minority Report Was Wrong About the Crime. For the wider subject, see sci-fi about surveillance.
The closest film in spirit: a clean, handsome future where your body has already predicted your life. Vincent was conceived the old way, with a heart defect and a forecast of 30.2 years, and he borrows another man's identity to get into space. It looks incredible, and the thriller plot is thin. Its prophecy is the interesting part. It got the technology almost exactly right, with embryo screening on sale and newborn genome reading now official policy in England. But the sorting didn't happen at the hiring office. Parents did it, at fertility clinics.
The most extreme version of the idea. A machine in a gold-lined box claims to calculate any moment of the past and future from the present state of the universe, and the future goes dark at the moment its owners can't predict. It's static, and it explains its ideas more than it shows them, so our score is lower. As prophecy the machine is probably ruled out by physics. But a 2025 model trained on millions of experimental choices predicted people's decisions better than established theories, which is the small, real version of the same instinct.
The gentlest pick here, and the sweetest. In a walled village, an app called Coach assigns people partners with expiry dates, promising an ideal match at the end with a 99.8% success rate. Georgina Campbell and Joe Cole carry it. The twist is cleverer and darker than the episode lets on: their defiance was only a simulation, and rebellion is the metric the app was measuring. The apps have since built much of it, from curated daily picks to AI stand-ins that date on your behalf. They still can't predict a spark between two people.
Less about predicting the future than about steering someone. A programmer is invited to decide whether a machine is conscious, and the real test turns out to be whether it can manipulate him. It fits here because its twist became a real research question: labs now run constructed tests to see whether models will deceive or manipulate their evaluators, and researchers have reported them doing so. Our score is 7.9, and its sharpest prediction is the one most people remember for the wrong reason.
What is the best movie like Minority Report?
Gattaca, for the same cool, designed future and the same fear of a system that decides who you are in advance. If you'd rather have a mystery with a murder in it, Devs is closer in plot, though much slower. Neither has Spielberg's chase.
Did Minority Report come true?
Mostly the gadgets, and not the Precrime. On our ledger, hand-gesture computing and self-driving cars have arrived, and talking billboards and automatic identification in public are on their way. But arresting people before a crime was DIVERGED: tools like PredPol were tried and dropped, and one independent test found fewer than half of one per cent of a company's predictions matched a reported crime. See the P(n) Board.
Is predictive policing real?
Yes, in weaker forms than the film. Systems have forecast places or scored individuals for police attention. The best-known, PredPol, was dropped by the LAPD in 2020 after an audit found too little evidence that it cut crime. Since February 2025 the EU AI Act has banned some individual-level crime prediction. The full account is in our essay.
Are there books like Minority Report?
Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story is the source, and it's much shorter than the film. Of the books we've reviewed, Neuromancer and Super Sad True Love Story are the nearest, though neither is about prediction as such: one is about an AI slipping its leash, the other about a society that scores people.