How Does the Real 2025 Compare to the One in ‘Hot Tub Time Machine 2’?
There have been a number of different kinds of movie time machines — from phone booths, to ancient Japanese scepters, to a cocaine trafficker’s wacky sports car. But it wasn’t until 2010 that a character broke the time barrier using a magical jacuzzi.
Hot Tub Time Machine was a goofy, but mostly enjoyable comedy that found John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson and Clark Duke traveling back in time to the 1980s. At least it nailed the complex nature of meddling with the timeline in a way that few other time-travel films do.
Because it was a modest success, Hot Tub Time Machine spawned a sequel. And it’s not great. In fact, it’s quite bad. Even John Cusack didn’t want to return for Hot Tub Time Machine 2, and that guy once made a movie in which cell phone signals turn people into telepathic zombies.
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But Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is worth re-examining, not for its humor, but for its futurism. That’s because a not insignificant portion of it is set in the very year that we just entered: 2025.
The movie finds the gang (minus Cusack’s character) traveling through time to solve a murder. The inciting incident of the story is Rob Corddry being fatally shot in the dick. And it’s only downhill from there.
Once they stumble into the future, they encounter a world filled with translucent holo-TVs, where Neil Patrick Harris is the President, and Jessica Williams has taken over hosting The Daily Show. Of course, one could argue that Williams starring in a TV show with Harrison Ford that’s made by a computer company, while The Daily Show is hosted by an increasingly haggard Jon Stewart, sounds more like a parody.
The characters do remark that not that much has changed in the world of 2025 — except for the dogs riding hoverboards. Meanwhile, self-driving cars are very much a thing, but they’re intelligent and sometimes suffer from road rage. Corddry’s character Lou even gets in a fight with one, which is able to detect that he has a “low sperm count.”
In the real 2025, self-driving cars do exist, and while they don’t get angry at each other, there have been a number crashes. They don’t detect sperm counts, but it was reported last year that “sexual activity” is one of the data points that Nissan collects about drivers, so Hot Tub Time Machine 2 wasn’t too far off.
And the TV landscape of “2025” includes a terrible reality show in which Christian Slater forces celebrities to have VR gay sex, which is probably why GLAAD called out Hot Tub Time Machine 2 for its gay panic and “significant defamatory content” at the time.
Incidentally, according to IMDb, the movie was originally set in 2024, because it took place 10 years in the future and was supposed to come out in 2014, not 2015. And so, they had to dub over all references to 2014 and 2024 to accommodate the move.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the rescheduling was reportedly because the studio didn’t want to compete with Seth Rogen’s The Interview, but it famously ended up being pulled from theaters following threats by the North Korean government.
You blew it, Hot Tub Time Machine 2. In so many ways.
