Several individuals are typing, and so they’re all saying Netflix’s Leave the World Behind is wildly prescient. The film, directed by Sam Esmail, opens on a world the place communication has been knocked out following a cyberattack. And earlier this week, when practically all of Meta’s platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Threads—went down, individuals took to (different) social media platforms to put up and hand-wring in regards to the apocalypse.

Most of the posts, per ordinary, have been jokes: wry observations to assist soothe the agita that comes with being alive when all the pieces feels unstable. “Another dry run for Leave the World Behind,” wrote one X user. “I fear we are moving close to a Leave the World Behind scenario,” wrote another. “These tech glitches are increasingly [sic] with regularity.”

But there was additionally a extra conspiratorial undercurrent. For those that don’t know, Leave the World Behind was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama by means of their firm Higher Ground Productions. Ever because the film’s launch, a conspiracy concept has endured on-line that the movie is by some means a warning in regards to the widespread dysfunction to come back.

This identical thread emerged late final month when an AT&T network outage wreaked havoc on US mobile networks. “The predictive programming of the Obama’s [sic] movie, Leave the World Behind, is becoming a little too real right now,” one consumer wrote on X. “I wouldn’t put it past our own federal government to institute a terrorist or cyber attack, just to blame it on foreign countries like China and Russia.”

Odds are that nothing of the kind occurred. Leave the World Behind is predicated on a 2020 book by Rumaan Alam and, in response to the movie’s director Sam Esmail, the previous US president got here on as a manufacturing companion solely after the script was just about achieved. “I would just say [the conspiracy theorists] are pretty wrong in terms of his signaling,” he told Collider. “It had nothing to do with that.”

Not that details have ever gotten in the way in which of an internet conspiracy earlier than. Case in level, this week’s large trailer drop: Civil War. When the primary trailer for Alex Garland’s subsequent movie dropped in December, on-line right-wing pundits speculated that it was additionally predictive programming, one thing meant to arrange the populace for occasions already deliberate by these in energy. When the brand new trailer dropped this week, individuals on Reddit and elsewhere appeared to be fretting that the movie will turn into, as The Hollywood Reporter put it, “MAGA fantasy fuel.”

Ultimately, reactions like these to Leave the World Behind and Civil War merely function proof that they’re efficient as works of fiction. They’re not a part of some psyop to placate the general public—they’re reactions to a political period that’s fraught at finest. Comfort shouldn’t be a prerequisite for good filmmaking; motion pictures are presupposed to be unsettling generally. Concerns a few film being too actual are simply indicators that the filmmakers have tapped in to the collective psyche. Rather than suppose that Esmail or Garland—or Obama, for that matter—try to ship some warning, maybe think about the circumstances for why you’re nervous that they could.