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My Own Grampa

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Nibblonian 1: It's a genetic abnormality which resulted when you went back in time and performed certain actions which made you your own grandfather. Fry: I did do the nasty in the past-y. — Futurama , " The Why of Fry "

Simply put, a Stable Time Loop where one is his own ancestor. Of course, this implies an Identical Grandson , and an Ontological Paradox which results in a quarter of one's DNA being created from out of nowhere. It also requires an incestuous coupling with another of one's ancestors, though the implications of this are seldom brought up.

If they're just pretending to be their grandchild, then that's My Grandson, Myself . See also Kid from the Future , for more time-travel and offspring-related hijinks, and Time-Travel Romance , which could also lead to this trope.

Subtrope of Funny Conception Story . See also Grandfather Paradox . Time-Traveler's Baby can be related to this trope.

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• In the What If? movie Dragon Ball – Episode of Bardock , Bardock is sent back in time to start the legend of the Saiyans. It's probably better to be "My Own Progenitor", though it's physically impossible for Bardock to be the Super Saiyan Vegeta described unless the legend was really muddled.
• EDENS ZERO has a twist of this trope with Ziggy, Shiki's adopted grandfather, revealed to be a future version of himself from a timeline where he was rebuilt as a robot . Ziggy's mission to reach Universe Zero with the Edens Zero and save Mother instead lead him to crash in the past and lose his memories. From there, he created the Four Shining Stars and found and adopted his younger self, an event that rippled across multiple timelines .
• In Hinamatsuri , the time-traveler Mao is implied to be a clone of herself.
• Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- : Following clone Syaoran and clone Sakura's Heroic Sacrifice , they re-incarnate in the past, meet, marry, and then become the parents of the original Syaoran. This all makes a weird sort of sense when you take into account that the Big Bad of the story has been making an attempt to rewrite the basic laws of reality, screwing up everything and causing things that should not make sense, or are flat out impossible to happen. When reality snaps back to normal, the original Syaoran becomes a walking paradox and is forced to continue wandering the multiverse as payment for his continued existence.
• Pierrot Bolneze in Yakitate!! Japan was abandoned at a circus as an infant, but by Kazuma Azuma's history-changing Taima Ja-pan, he goes back to his childhood and ends up saving his mother from Death by Childbirth . When Pierrot comes back to current time, both his parents are alive in this timeline. In this version of reality, he became a clown and was named Pierrot because his parents were so impressed with their old butler, the adult Pierrot from the future who was abandoned and raised in a circus.
• DC One Million has the series antagonist Solaris, an evil artificial intelligence, sending a computer virus back to the 20th century, which is stopped by the Justice League by building a supercomputer to contain it, thus leading to the events that caused the rise of Solaris in the 853rd century in the first place.
• In the Year Three arc of the Tenth Doctor Doctor Who (Titan) comics, it is strongly implied that the Doctor's contemporary-origin companion Cindy Wu is descended from one of the clones that the Paranestene created from her in ancient China.
• In a 1952 EC Comics story "Why Papa Left Home" (published in Weird Science #11) a scientist invents a time machine and plans to test it by sending his assistant, Raymond 25 years to the past for two hours. However, due to an accident, Raymond ends up stranded in the past for two years. During this time, he falls in love with a woman, marries her, and they have a son (named Raymond Jr.). When he's brought back to the present, and meets his mother, he realizes that the child he fathered was himself.
• A bizarre example in MAD 's Gasoline Alley parody, where the characters' disjointed aging rates eventually results in the protagonist's wife turning into his daughter , prompting him to exclaim the trope name.
• What complicates it is that Reed Richards' father and Kang are both named Nathaniel Richards, but are completely separate people. We think.
• That can be explained by the Nathaniel Richards, who is Kang, is named in honor of the creator of the utopian society on Earth he originated from, Reed Richards' father: Nathaniel Richards...who is also a time-traveler.
• Kang is a bit of a mess. There is another character Immortus, more or less a good guy, who's a future version of Kang, and there turns out to be a rather large group of Kangs, from different points of their own timeline or from paralleled realities, that cooperate and occasionally congregate for various purposes, then there's a larger group of Kang-analogs that are clearly Kang but have different faces, different genders, different species... Eventually Kang is (much to his delight) able to change the timeline sufficiently that Immortus is the future self of an alternate Kang instead of the future self of him .
• It is supposed to be impossible in the Marvel universe to become our own ancestor because you can't actually travel into your own past, unless you have 'Doomlock', a Magitek means of doing so invented by Doctor Doom. If you try without one, you end up in what will already become a different universe than the one you left (for example, Rachel Summers tried to avert the future she came from, only to eventually find out she had arrived in a different timeline). This is a good thing, as overuse of the Doomlock leads to the Time Crash of Age of Ultron (the comic, not the film ) and is revisited as a problem in The Ultimates (2015) .
• In X-Factor , the longstanding question of Shatterstar 's relationship with Longshot was finally resolved. Due to a mystical battle, Shatterstar got blasted back to his native dimension Mojoworld , but in the past . The Spineless One scientist Arize used genetic material taken from Shatterstar to create Longshot. At a relative future point in Mojoworld's timeline, Longshot will father a child with the human mutant Dazzler . This child will be Shatterstar . The infant will then be taken even further into the future, to be raised to become a gladiator and living a Stable Time Loop that includes his own involvement in the creation of his "father" and arranging his own upbringing. And we thought Cable and Rachel Summers had messed up origin stories!
• The Futurama fanfic Blame It on the Brain makes greater use of the idea of Fry being his own grandfather. Not only does this give him an immunity to the Brainspawn due to his lack of a delta brainwave, but his self-manifestation gives him a link to the fundamental fabric of the universe, much like the Nibblonians and the Brainspawn, who are essentially inverted versions of each other, although it is left unclear whether the Brainspawn manifested from the Nibblonians or the Nibblonians are the pre-flection of the Brainspawn .
• Referenced in Kyon: Big Damn Hero , with Kyon recalling someone saying he looked identical to his grandfather at that age. Given how much time-traveling he does...
• At the end of Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami , it turns out that Dark is actually his own father .
• In Memento Vivere , a Final Fantasy X fanfiction, this question seems to rise when Braska starts flirting with Rikku . Although technically they aren’t related by blood...
• Referenced but averted in "Mr. Bennet Travels Through Time", a Pride and Prejudice fanfic in which the Bennet girls' father is a stranded time-traveler from the future. Shortly after becoming stranded he worries about the prospect of becoming his own ancestor, but in the event he only has daughters, so any Bennets in his own time must be descended from someone else.
• Averted in the Worm fanfic Recoil where, while a younger Danny Hebert does form a crush on his alt-daughter Taylor ( he doesn't know any better), she introduces him to his future wife at the first opportunity. Also subverted, in that Danny's parents were trying to encourage the match.
• Spoofed in Detention . "Ione is pregnant with herself?"
• Caesar from the original Planet of the Apes series was born when his parents traveled back in time, and he essentially became their distant ancestor as well as the forefather of the ape race.
• Poor Things has a rare non-time travel example by way of mad science. Bella Baxter was created, Frankenstein-style, out of the intact body of a woman named Victoria Blessington, who committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, and the brain of Victoria's unborn baby daughter, who was still struggling to live as her mother's body died. The baby's brain was placed in the head of the body that used to be Victoria's, and it's that brain that matures into the Bella we know and love- making Bella her own mother.
• Predestination , the film based on the Heinlein story in the Literature section, except it takes the Mind Screw a few steps further. Got a flow chart? So the time agent is tracking a terrorist, and while doing so recruits a transman who turns out had sex with his female self, who then gave birth to him/herself. Said Time Agent takes the resulting baby to the orphanage to where said transperson was found, THEN is revealed not only to be a future version of the transman, but the terrorist he's tracking is a version of him even FURTHER down the line. No, don't worry, the headache will pass.
• The first sequel is a more straight-played example, with SkyNet being created by people who found a piece of one of SkyNet's agents.
• Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann , where the hero went back in time and became his own great-grandfather.
• In Book of the New Sun , this is played completely straight, although never spoken plainly, where it is heavily implied that Dorcas is Severian's Grandmother, and Severian is His Own Grandpa , due to the ever-present time travel.
• Some fans interpreted it as a clue that Time Travel would make a reappearance in the series, especially since Rowling referred to it as a "deliberate mistake" , but she was clearly being tongue-in-cheek.
• Spider Robinson's Have You Heard The One... features a visit to Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by a time-traveling salesman, whose plans are foiled by Philip Jose Farmer's daughter Josie, who mentions that she "thinks she's going to grow up to be Mom."
• Played to the extreme in the story —All You Zombies— . The protagonist is a man who is both of his own parents. The story starts with him telling his backstory to a bartender: He was born female, and got pregnant after sleeping with a man. She gave birth via c-section, where it was discovered she was a hermaphrodite with internal male genitalia. Complications during the birth caused her to lose the function of her female genitalia so the doctors swapped them out for the still-functioning male genitalia, and she has been living as a man ever since. The bartender reveals himself as a time traveller working for a secret organization, and offers to take the protagonist back in time so he can save himself from that jerk who knocked him up and then disappeared. It is only after seducing and sleeping with his past female self that he realizes that he was the jerk. Meanwhile, the bartender travels nine months into the future to when the protagonist gives birth to herself, kidnaps the baby, and takes it further into the past to drop it off at an orphanage, thus completing the Stable Time Loop . Because the bartender is the protagonist too , only older, and he wants to ensure his own creation. This twist is simultaneously foreshadowed and lampshaded at the beginning of the story, when "I'm My Own Grandpa" starts playing on the jukebox in the bartender's bar, and the protagonist becomes angry and shuts it off .
• By His Bootstraps is an example by the same author of the "milder" version described above.
• Time Enough for Love has a blurb on the back cover that claims this trope occurs, but it couldn't have happened in the novel, nor could it have happened off-stage, since Lazarus's arrival date in the past was after his own birth, quite intentionally (and Maureen is already pregnant with a younger sibling of Lazarus when he arrives). The blurb-writer got a few other details of the book wrong, and probably was working from a grossly simplified synopsis.
• Parodied in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . Zaphod Beeblebrox's father is Zaphod Beeblebrox the Second, while his grandfather is Zaphod Beeblebrox the Third and his late great-grandfather is Zaphod Beeblebrox the Fourth. (Despite what one might think, there's no ancestral Beeblebrox numbered the Fifth or higher.) When asked why, he says it was "an accident involving a contraceptive and a time machine ". His great-grandfather, when summoned via séance, takes to referring to him as "Zaphod Beeblebrox the Nothingth" as an insult because of it. Though The Hitchhiker's Guide does state that becoming one's own grandparent through time travel is nothing that a significantly well-adjusted family can't deal with.
• The Infected is not precisely this, but after a trip through time, Brian does wind up fathering one of his best friends, Scott.
• Downplayed in The Licanius Trilogy . Davian isn't his own ancestor, but time travel does result in his saving his father's life and introducing his parents to each other.
• The Man Who Folded Himself , Dan is his own mother and father. How this is possible when time travel to the past forks into an alternate reality is unclear.
• In a book called The Mirror , a young woman switches bodies/eras with her grandmother, and then lives her life (in other words, she is the one who has the great romance with the grandfather, who is thought by the family to be psychic, who gives birth to her mother...). At the beginning/end of the book , she dies as her grandmother, while her grandmother then lives the rest of her life.
• Chuck Palahniuk's novel Rant - many of the major characters repeatedly go back in time to become their father, grandfather, great-grandfather, etc. with the theory that this eventually allows for an ascent into godhood via killing yourself since things without beginning have no end. Not only that, the main character himself is his own father father and grandfather entire line of male ancestors. Lots of time travel needed for that.
• The Star Diaries , "The Twenty-eighth Voyage": The private log of Cosimo Tichy, captain of a spaceship approaching the speed of light, mentions Cosimo's relative Amphotericus confiding to him that as a consequence of the latest temporal paradox (accelerating, the ship's stern had "cut across an isochronal"), Amphotericus is now his own father. [A]pparently his time line knotted up into a loop.
• Robert Silverberg 's time-travel novel Up the Line has a character who is trying to sleep with all his female ancestors, except his mother (as he puts it, "I draw the line at abominations"). He's careful not to father any children, he is just seeking to cuckold all of his male ancestors (except his father because sleeping with his own mom would be sick).
• Darla sired Liam, later known as Angel , who in turn sired Drusilla. After getting staked early on Buffy the Vampire Slayer , Darla is resurrected as a human in the spinoff - but she still has the disease that was killing her before she became a vampire. As a last resort, Lindsey brings in Drusilla to vamp her. On having this "family tree" explained to him, Gunn has this to say: "That means the granddaughter remade the grandmother. Man, somehow that weirds me out more than the whole bloodsucking thing."
• Bodies (2023) : Elias is born in the 21st century, travels back in time to Victorian London to live as "Julian Harker", marries Polly, and starts a bloodline that culminates in Danny Barber conceiving him with Sarah Mannix .
• Charmed : Piper Halliwell's past life, P. Baxter, was the great-grandmother of her present life. Points for being biologically possible, as the soul is the same, not the body.
• In Season 3, it's revealed that the child of Jonas and Martha from Eva's World later will give birth to Tronte from both universes, who will give birth to Ulrich, Mikkel, Magnus, Martha (from both worlds) and Jonas (from Adam's World) making all of them their own ancestors as well as descendants.
• In The Flipside of Dominick Hide , Dominick, who comes from 2130, travels back in time to London in 1980 in hope of meeting the great-great grandfather he's heard so much about. It turns out to be a journey of self-discovery.
• Mentioned on The Office (US) of all places, where Dwight claims that his ancestors were farmers, and before that, hunters, and before that, time travelers, and before that, Dwight himself again. Or at least that's how the legend goes. Based on some of the Schrute family's traditions, it's really not that far a stretch to think they really believe in that.
• Orphan Black has a weird variant without time travel, in which the heroine Sarah turns out to be a clone of her adoptive mother's own mother .
• Red Dwarf 's Lister is his own father , through time-travel shenanigans and other convoluted oddness.
• Russian Doll offered an attempted variant in season 2. Nadia time travelled to 1982, witnessed her own birth, and decided to take her newborn self back to 2022, thinking that for all the upbringing issues that made her such a screwed up person, no one would be better to raise the baby but herself - pointing out "being my own mother will bring me an aneurysm". Thus the same person twice in the future causes a Time Crash .
• In an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , Bashir wonders about this when he meets a woman on Kirk's Enterprise whose last name was that of an ancestor's, but it proved not to be true. Played for Laughs when Bashir argues that he must have sex with the woman after she invites him to her quarters, but Miles O'Brien refuses to let him be Distracted by the Sexy . Bashir: I can't wait to get back to Deep Space Nine and see your face when you find out that I never existed!
• In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles , the SkyNet example is taken even further, with the future AI going to great lengths to essentially create itself, since human time travelers are quite willing to kill people who create SkyNet on their own in an effort to prevent Judgement Day. Later it's revealed that some of the Terminators are from a rogue faction who are completely ambivalent to humans (though perfectly willing to kill individuals who present a threat to them) but very much opposed to SkyNet, and have gone back in time to create their own anti-SkyNet AI that will go on to create them in the future.
• A Running Gag in the first season of Dimension20 , Fantasy High , is PC Gorgug's attempts at locating his biological father. In episode 7, "Graveyard of Good and Evil", he rolls a natural one on an insight check and for a moment considers the possibility that he could be his own dad. He is not. GM: You're not proud of this. But you've been struggling with this for so long that momentarily, it occurs to you that there's a possibility, however slim, that you are your own dad.
• Add to that that Chimeramon was created by Ken as a direct result of him having been hit by Milleniummon's dark spores years earlier. The irony being that Ken ended up setting the events in motion that screwed up Ryo's life by Taking the Bullet for him.
• A variant shows up in the first Ecco the Dolphin game. While Ecco is in the distant past, he can meet some proto-cetaceans who live on the land. Speaking to them gives them idea to try living in the sea. Thus, while Ecco isn't his own genetic ancestor (it's unlikely he'd have been able to breed with his evolutionary ancestors), he does accidentally set them on the path that leads to modern cetaceans.
• Caeldori from Fire Emblem Fates is an Expy of Cordelia from Fire Emblem: Awakening , but several lines imply Cordelia is actually a reincarnation of Caeldori. Where this trope comes in is that, on the Revelation route, it's possible for Caeldori's mother to be Selena... who is Severa, Cordelia's daughter from Awakening . Time-travel and world-hopping does weird things.
• Oracle of Tao has a version of this that doesn't involve time travel, but rather a God in Human Form situation, where God impregnates her mother, even though God turns out to be her true form. There are so many things wrong with this .
• Shadow of Destiny : In this game, the protagonist Eike Kusch gains the ability to travel through time. In the second chapter, he meets up with a friend who owns a museum, Eckhart Brum, whose cat has just had a large litter of kittens. In a later chapter, Eike travels to 1902 and meets Eckhart's great-grandfather Alfred Brum. Alfred has a daughter named Sibylla (Eckart's great-aunt) who is lonely and Eike decides to give her a kitten. Eike returns to the present and then back to give Sibylla one of Eckhart's kittens which will inevitably become its own ancestor.
• In Red vs. Blue , Genkins refers to Chrovos as "grandpa" given they created the two gods who in turn made him. Then once Genkins returns to the beginning of the universe, hoping to become more powerful like grandpa, he becomes Chrovos, including the part about being locked up by his children. Chrovos is surprised upon learning this, as they had forgotten this as eons passed.
• John, in the present, finds a cloning station which is locked on to four people: his Nanna, Jade's Grandpa, Rose's Mom, and Dave's Bro . He clones all four of them, using paradox slime. The slime from Nanna and Grandpa is mixed together, as is the slime from Mom and Bro. From the Grandpa/Grandma slime, clones of John and Jade are created, as are Rose and Dave from Mom/Bro slime . These clone babies of himself and his friends are sent back in time, to become who they are now . Four "pure" clones babies are also created ... and sent back to become Nanna, Grandpa, Mom and Bro in the first place.
• This also happened with the trolls, with Karkat performing John's role. In this case, owing to the fact that troll parentage sure is weird , he also created the trolls' famous ancestors , who are actually their decendants. The fact that he was the one who cloned them in the first place means that, by some definitions of parent, he is their collective father.
• In the post-scratch universe , the kids and their guardians switch places, but presumably keep their old biology . It must be clarified that while the kids and guardians are related in addition to John & Jade and Rose & Dave being sibling pairs, the guardians/post-scratch kids are not related to each other due to being true paradox clones .
• The simplest way to describe the relationships between the players in Homestuck is that everyone is everyone's grandparent.
• Irregular Webcomic! : Adam and Jamie from MythBusters attempt to do this. They screw it up by accidentally sleeping with their counterpart's grandmother, becoming each other's grandfather, but incidentally it does make themselves their own great-great-grandfathers . Which, incidentally does prove that this trope can happen, which was the whole reason they attempted this in the first place. Myth confirmed!
• Subverted in the very NSFW webcomic Oglaf when Oedipus is convinced by his mother Jocasta to impregnate her ( and two other versions of Jocasta ) with himself. It turns out that he kept his father's "equipment" and used it as a substitute.
• Wicked Powered : Taken to its natural extreme. The main character was sent back in time twice (once as a woman and once as a man). He arrived in the same time on both occasions. The two instances met, fell in love, got married, and conceived a child. Take a guess as to who this child was. Oh. And the 'aunt' he was living with was actually his pet monkey. And apparently, being your own parents makes you immortal. Or something.
• The Nostalgia Critic describes The Thief and the Cobbler and Aladdin thus: When I hear pop cultural references in a film that takes place in Arabia, I think of Aladdin . But this was being made before Aladdin . Apparently, Disney animators drew influence from this movie when it was being made that helped Aladdin get off the ground. And after that came out, the new producers of this film drew influence from Aladdin . So Aladdin ripped off this, only to have this rip off Aladdin . Basically, the film is a product of animated inbreeding . Suddenly, this is all starting to make more sense, isn't it?
• One of the members of the SCP Foundation ’s O5 council, Joey Tamlin , went 2000 years back in time and kickstarted his entire bloodline. This bloodline being the Brights .
• The Fairly OddParents! has an example. In the Crash Nebula episode, Wanda says that there is an episode where Crash discovers he's his own great grandfather after traveling through time.
• " The Big Bang Theory " has Stewie taking the place of his ancestor Leonardo da Vinci when he is killed by Bertram and managing to pass his own genes down before freezing himself and taking The Slow Path back.
• " Peter's Sister " had a Cutaway Gag showing an alternate ending to Back to the Future wherein Marty figures that since he's about to fade into oblivion , he might as well have sex with his mother in the past. The result is that in his picture of himself and his parents, they're replaced with an inbred Marty and the "To Be Continued" card is replaced with "To Be Contondered".
• Futurama provides a well-known example in its protagonist Fry, who unwittingly becomes his own grandfather. It's originally set up as the major plot point in " Roswell That Ends Well ", in which Fry travels back in time to 1947 and encounters his grandfather Enos Fry. Fry becomes outrageously paranoid about Enos dying before he can have children, therefore causing Fry's own erasure from existence , and so starts obsessively protecting him from anything even remotely dangerous... and in doing so ends up accidentally getting him killed. However, his death does not erase Fry from existence as expected, which greatly confuses him. Later, Enos's grieving girlfriend (Fry's grandmother) drunkenly propositions him. Fry reciprocates, deducing that his continued existence must mean that Enos wasn't really his grandfather, and therefore that this woman isn't really his grandmother. He's half right. While it seems like an interesting gag for that episode, it turns out to be a future plot point, as "the nasty in the past-y" (as they call it) causes differences to Fry's physiology that make him immune to certain forms of mind control. They even planned it from the start, providing a Rewatch Bonus a couple of times, especially once " The Why of Fry " reveals that the Nibblonians deliberately engineered Fry's stint as a Human Popsicle and his "past-nastification" so that he can use his mind-control resistance to defeat the Brainspawn and the Dark Ones . The experience also technically makes Fry's dad/son Yancy Fry Sr. his own grandpa, and the characters stop caring much about Temporal Paradoxes after this point knowing what Fry was able to do with few ill effects: Farnsworth: Let's just steal the damn dish and get back to our own time! Fry: But— But won't that change history? Farnsworth: Oh, a lesson on not changing history from Mr. I'm-My-Own-Grandpa. Let's just get the hell out of here already! Screw history!
• At the end of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy episode " Test of Time ", after Billy and Mandy mess around with Grim's time manipulation remote, Billy ends up stranded at the dawn of man and falls in love with a cavewoman, resulting in him not only becoming his own ancestor but also the progenitor of all modern human ( and animal ) life on Earth. The last scene is of Billy waiting for the school bus like at the beginning, only now everyone else is as dumb as him and has his Black Bead Eyes and Gag Nose .
• In the I Am Weasel episode "My Friend, the Smart Banana", Weasel and the banana have an intellectual discussion and conclude that if you travel faster than the speed of light, you become your own grandmother.
• Brought up in a Robot Chicken sketch where The Force Awakens is announced. Among all of the outlandish ways that it could potentially go wrong, one of them is a plot twist that Luke is his own father. This is accompanied by two Lukes having a lightsaber duel as one of them yells "I'll never join me!"
• In an episode of Xiaolin Showdown , Dojo warns Omi that by using the Sands of Time, "You can end up becoming your own grandpa." It can't actually happen, as time travel in this series operates on a "change the past you change the future" type deal.

Alternative Title(s): My Own Grandpa , I Am My Own Grandfather

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Best Movies About Time Travel

Time travel has occupied the collective imagination for a long time, and many great films have been exploring the concept for quite a while.

Do you ever wish to go back and change the past? Maybe you’d return to tell a deceased loved one how much they meant to you. Or perhaps you’d reveal your true feelings for your crush and prevent them from marrying someone else. What if you visited the past to prevent yourself from doing that one thing that set off a chain of irreversible events? What would you do? Whatever the reason, many of us wish time travel was possible.

In cinematic films, time travel can be a difficult concept to grasp. That could be because every movie seems to have its own theories ( based on real and not-so-real science ), and time-traveling rules are inconsistent. So, viewers never know what to expect when watching these types of movies. Regardless, there have been many great time-traveling movies over the years, from Hollywood masterpieces like 12 Monkeys to indie experiments like Primer. Today we’re highlighting a few of the best, so buckle up and get ready to jump back in time to relive the magic of these movies.

Updated June 2023: If you're a fan of movies with time travel, you're in luck. This article has been updated with additional content and entries by Danilo Raúl .

15 Avengers: Endgame (2019)

The Russo Brothers direct the final chapter in the Infinity Saga. Avengers: Endgame heavily features elements of time travel to undo the damage caused by Thanos in the aftermath of the blip. The all-star ensemble cast includes the six original Avengers, Ant-Man, Nebula, and Rocket, using the Quantum realm to travel back in time to different periods in the main MCU timeline to collect the six gems and wish everyone back to life. Unfortunately, Thanos gets a hold of their plans after Nebula fails her mission. The time-displaced Nebula helps Thanos replicate the technology to return to the present, and the Mad Titan vows to erase every living entity on the planet after watching their efforts to undo his work.

14 The Final Countdown (1980)

The Final Countdown is an underrated classic from the '80s, directed by Don Taylor and starring Kirk Douglas and Martin Sheen. The story begins with the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz departing the Naval Station of Pearl Harbor for naval exercises in the mid-Pacific Ocean. Suddenly the ship is time displaced by an electrical storm that opens a vortex. The whole ship was transported to the same place on December 6, 1941, just a few hours before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Incidentally, the crew intervenes in the timeline by saving a prominent politician who would become Franklin D. Roosevelt's running mate and eventual successor after his death. The crew also takes two Japanese prisoners, but they manage to outthink their captors and end up dead. The ship's staff decides to intervene and save the Pearl Harbor base, but it may be too late to do so, as the time paradox won't allow for any changes in history.

13 Tenet (2020)

You have to hand it to Christopher Nolan: the man knows how to keep your attention with most of his films. This magnificent film was poorly released, making it a box office failure. However, it tells a compelling story that requires multiple views to catch all nuances in the story — starring John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, and Elizabeth Debicki.

We follow the Protagonist, who joins an organization named Tenet to prevent World War III. Backward technology is used to build plot elements to move the story forward. Neil and Kat are with the Protagonist every step of the way, and the story, while linear, goes back and forth to specific moments where the main characters have to fight themselves to move ahead.

12 Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko is a mind-bending cult classic directed by Richard Kelly. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, the plot follows Donnie, a troubled young man who suddenly starts experiencing visions of a man in a rabbit costume named Frank. Donny illustrates his state of mind with numerous experiences that we cannot realize if they are happening in his mind.

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Donnie seems able to manipulate time and is guided by Frank. He's on a journey to uncover the secrets of his existence and prevent a catastrophic event related to a mysterious plane crash and the life of a girl he likes. It's a solid film exploring themes of free will and the boundaries between reality and imagination. The story is designed to challenge the audience and question the nature of time as a man-made concept.

11 Predestination (2014)

The Spierig Brothers set out to blow the minds of audiences with Predestination , and they did so efficiently. Starring Ethan Hawke as a time-displaced agent for SpaceCorp tasked with solving time-traveling crimes, the agent is sent on a final mission after sustaining heavy damage in his previous outing. His undercover work puts him in a position where he becomes his own father and mother. It's a highly complex story with many nuances and may require multiple viewings to understand. Still, it's well worth the watch, as the film explores numerous themes of self-love, transgenderism, and predestination paradoxes, a concept heavily studied in Christian culture.

10 The Butterfly Effect (2004)

The Butterfly Effect is a wonderful film touching on time travel based on the philosophical concept of studying the sensitive dependence of specific convictions that can be affected due to small changes in a state of nonlinear systems that result in unending changes at later events. The movie is written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber and somehow fooled everyone into thinking Aston Kutcher had any more range than being able to play Kelso from That '70s Show .

In the story, Evan Treborn grows up to experience blackouts. As an adult, he finds out he can travel back in time to his own body and alter events to prevent specific events from happening. Each time Evan tries to fix something, he further damages the circumstances of his loved ones in the future. Ultimately, he goes for the safest option and cuts ties with the loved ones who seem to be affected by his actions.

9 The Tomorrow War (2021)

The Tomorrow War presents a solid premise. Directed by Chris McKay and starring Chris Pratt, the future comes calling to the past, as humanity is fighting a losing war against an Alien invasion of unknown origin. The world needs soldiers, so they start a draft to fight the White Spikes in the future . We follow former Green Beret Dan Forester, who volunteers to fight.

Despise their efforts, humanity only stands a chance against the aliens once they figure out the Spikes arrived on earth at an earlier point in time, and global warming released them from their icy prison. Now it's up to Dan, his dad, and a group of volunteers to prevent the invasion by taking out the White Spikes in the present before they get rid of humanity in the future.

8 Time Bandits (1981)

Prepare for a wild adventure in this 1981 British fantasy film starring Sean Connery , John Cleese, Michael Palin, and Shelley Duvall. Eleven-year-old Kevin is ignored by his parents, who are obsessed with staying up to date with the newest trends and devices. One night, Kevin witnesses six little people coming out of his wardrobe and joins them on an epic quest through time. Time Bandits is popular among movie critics and has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 90% and an audience score of 77%. Shenanigans await, along with an infamously bleak ending, so proceed with caution!

7 The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

In The Time Traveler’s Wife, Henry De Tamble (Eric Bana) has a genetic condition that makes him shift uncontrollably back and forth through time. During one of his episodes, he meets the love of his life, Claire (Rachel McAdams), and marries her. Henry wishes to have a happy life and start a family with Claire, but his genetic condition makes that nearly impossible, considering he is always time-traveling at the most inconvenient moments. However, despite the odds, Henry tries to do everything in his power to give Claire a happy life. It seems love has no time limit in this sentimental romance.

Related: 16 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time, Ranked

6 Interstellar (2014)

In a dystopian future, it’s a race against time for Professor Brand (Michael Caine), who is trying to save mankind from crop blights and dust storms that are slowly destroying Earth . His idea is to transport Earth’s population to a new planet. To do this, he will need the aid of NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to test his means of transportation (a wormhole) and to discover which planet is ideal for living on.

To complete his mission, Cooper will have to make sacrifices as he strives to save mankind. While Interstellar was nominated for several Academy Awards, it only won for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. The film is a head-trip through the concept of time travel, using the notion to explore a father-daughter relationship emotionally.

5 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the third installment of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. During their third year of Hogwarts, Hermione is given a Time-Turner to attend extra classes. After Harry’s godfather Sirius Black is captured and given to the Dementors who are about to suck out his soul, Harry and Hermione use the Time-Turner to go back in time to rescue him.

However, they must be careful not to accidentally be seen by their previous selves as that could disrupt time and cause permanent damage. This film has the most explicit use of time travel in the franchise, and the concept is used with whimsical delight suitable for kid-friendly films. While Professor Trelawney’s tea reading classes may be fictitious, the rules of the time-turner are not.

4 Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

Jake (Asa Butterfield) grew up listening to his grandfather tell stories of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children , an orphanage for children with special powers. After his grandfather is mysteriously murdered, Jake finds clues that lead him to a new world, the wonderful world of Miss Peregrine and her children with peculiar abilities, known as Peculiars. There, he meets, Miss Alma Peregrine (Eva Green) who reveals herself to be a Peculiar called a Ymbryne. Her powers are transforming into a bird and manipulating time in this magical, mystical movie full of stunning special effects and time-travel superpowers which are rarely explored.

3 X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

X-Men: Days of Future Past is just one of many superhero movies within the Marvel Universe, but is the most explicit about time travel. The mutants who make up the X-Men, Wolverine, (Hugh Jackman), Raven (Jennifer Lawrence), Professor X (James McAvoy), and Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), must travel back in time to try to stop the Sentinels, enormous robotic weapons bred to destroy mutants. This fantasy action-adventure film has an impressive Rotten Tomatoes rating of 90% and an audience score of 91%, and uses time-travel in some of the most action-packed, special effects-laden ways in film.

Related: Why None of the Old X-Men Cast Should Return in the MCU

2 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Embark on a time-traveling journey to save Earth with the Starfleet crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a mysterious probe drifts through space and starts to orbit around Earth, destroying every starship it passes. The orbit sends out an indecipherable signal which Spock believes matches the songs of extinct humpback whales, and that a whale could respond to the orbit. Therefore, Captain Kirk and his crew travel back in time to Earth to 1986 to a time before Humpback whales went extinct.

Often considered the most comical and delightful film in the entire Star Trek franchise, the movie embraces the comedy of placing these futuristic sci-fi heroes into the '80s and the ridiculousness of sending a whale through time. It's a silly but iconic take on time travel.

1 Back to the Future Trilogy (1985)

The Back to the Future trilogy is a masterpiece that combines all the great elements of a movie from the '80s : music, action, and great hair. Join Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and Dr. Emmet Brown (Christopher Lloyd) as they jump between timelines, attempting to correct their mistakes while trying to avoid permanent damage to the space-time continuum.

From start to finish, all three movies are a magical ride showing viewers Marty’s hometown of Hill Valley in different periods: 1885, 1955, 1985, 2015, and one dystopian alternate universe in 1985 where antagonist Biff Tannen rules the town. These are funny films, and yet they take the issue of time travel (and all the ethical and scientific ramifications therein) seriously. This is heavy stuff, doc!

‘The Adam Project’ Screenwriter Reveals New Details on His Ryan Reynolds Time Travel Netflix Movie

Plus, screenwriter Jonathan Tropper shares what it was like working with Ryan Reynolds on the script.

If we had to pick one Netflix original movie we're looking forward to watching, it would have to be  The Adam Project . Directed by  Shawn Levy ,  The Adam Project  stars  Ryan Reynolds   as a man who must travel back in time to team up with his adolescent self and together, find their father ( Mark Ruffalo ) who has information essential to save the world. In addition to Reynolds and Ruffalo,  The Adam Project  also stars  Jennifer Garner ,  Zoe Saldana , Catherine Keener , and newcomer  Walker Scobell as the younger version of Reynolds' character.

Time travel and Reynolds are an incredible movie pairing, to be sure. It's a pairing made possible in part by screenwriter  Jonathan Tropper , whose work on  The Adam Project  script will be seen when the movie hits Netflix. Recently, Collider's own Christina Radish had the chance to speak with Tropper about  The Adam Project  during an interview primarily about the release of Tropper's Cinemax series  Banshee  on HBO Max . One of our most pressing questions for Tropper had to do with his handling of the time travel plot device. Was this aspect of  The Adam Project story the reason he boarded the project to rework earlier drafts written by  Jennifer Flackett , Mark Levin , and T.S. Nowlin , respectively?

Tropper shared with Collider, "To me, the time was just a device. The movie is not a hardcore sci-fi time travel movie. It’s a movie about people," and went on to explain that "for me, it was more about the characters and the story of this boy who’s lost his father and is trying to come to terms with what that means, through a really interesting adventure. I’m never gonna write a Christopher Nolan-type movie about time travel. That wouldn’t interest me. For me, it’s more about finding that story that appeals to the little kid in all of us."

RELATED: 'The Adam Project': New Images of Ryan Reynolds & Mark Ruffalo Tease Quality Father-Son Bonding Time

As previously mentioned, Tropper is the most recent screenwriter to board The Adam Project but he brought with him a wealth of writing experience to the project. In addition to writing on  Banshee , Tropper has also written episodes of  Warrior ,  Vinyl , and adapted the script for the Levy-directed 2014 dramedy  This Is Where I Leave You  from his own novel of the same name. So, how exactly did Tropper get involved with  The Adam Project ?

"I fell into this TV career of genre action," Tropper began. "It’s not what my first love was. I grew up as a much more mainstream Hollywood movie fan. I was a big Steven Spielberg fan. The four quad adventures of my childhood are what made me love movies – Raiders of the Lost Ark , E.T. , Star Wars , and things like that. Then, I became a novelist who wrote grounded literary fiction about screwed-up humans, but real humans, not action show humans."

He continued, explaining, "The TV thing was an odd left turn for me; the fact that the first thing I sold was Banshee . I had first come out to Hollywood, trying to sell shows that were much more like my books, dramedies about families and things like that, and I just couldn’t sell them. So, I ended up going to my love for action movies and went down that road, but my heart always remained in those big family adventure films too."

" The Adam Project is something that I’ve been working on for eight years," Tropper shared with us. "I wrote it eight years ago and I just really fought hard to keep it alive at the studio and to keep them looking for the right way to make it, but it’s not really a departure for me. The TV stuff is the departure for me."

RELATED: Watch: Ryan Reynolds' Young 'Adam Project' Co-Star Performs This 'Deadpool 2' Monologue Too Perfectly

We were also curious to know what Tropper's experience working with Reynolds was like. Reynolds serves as a producer on  The Adam Project  in addition to his leading man duties, so he worked closely with Tropper in getting this movie on its feet.

Tropper offered up an exciting nugget about his working relationship with Reynolds, telling Collider,

Yes. First of all, he’s also a producer on the film. He and Shawn Levy, the director (who I’ve worked with before), spent a lot of time pouring over the script, and Ryan gave a lot of input into the script, absolutely. He’s very sharp-witted and his wit is very specific. It’s not just his wit, his sense of character is very sharp. We spent a lot of time honing the script together once he came on board.

Tropper's comments about  The Adam Project  only increase our interest in this Netflix original and we're more than ready to what his script will look like onscreen.

The Adam Project doesn't yet have a release date on Netflix.

KEEP READING: 'Banshee' Creator Jonathan Tropper on Why He Changed the Ending of the Series After Season 3

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Predestination explained: Who is the Fizzle Bomber?

Get ready for some time-travelling madness...

Since its release in 2014, the time-travel drama Predestination has earned a reputation for being one of the most head-scratching science fiction movies of recent years.

On the surface, the movie is about a special investigator (Ethan Hawke) who can travel back and forth through time to catch criminals, and his current case (and the last one before he retires) is to find a deadly bomber who has been killing people at different times in the past.

However, the story becomes much more than that when the investigator, working undercover in a bar, meets a mysterious man and hears his jaw-dropping life story – a tale that turns out to have ramifications for both of them.

And if you're still puzzling as the end credits roll, read on as we unravel the mysteries of Predestination – though, be warned, that means major spoilers lie ahead.

Predestination ending explained: Why is Jane's life story so important?

To understand the twists and turns of the time travel plot in Predestination , we need to go back to the beginning (except, of course, it isn't actually the beginning – but we'll get to that later).

The movie opens with a confrontation between the Fizzle Bomber and the time-travelling investigator, which ends with the investigator being engulfed by flames. He manages to return to his own time, where surgeons save him but warn him his face will be very different (and when the bandages are removed, he looks like Ethan Hawke).

We next meet him working in a bar – to avoid confusion, it's probably easiest to call him the Bartender – in 1970 New York, where the Fizzle Bomber is due to strike. Into the bar walks a man who promises to tell the Bartender a story that will amaze him.

The stranger reveals that he is a writer of confessional stories for a women's magazine who writes under the name The Unmarried Mother. He then tells the Bartender his life story – beginning with the revelation that he was assigned female at birth and named Jane at the orphanage where they were raised.

Jane (Sarah Snook) reveals she never fit in with the other children when she was growing up, and as an adult, she was selected to be part of a special space programme. However, after she was disqualified on medical grounds, she fell in love with a man who later vanished, leaving her pregnant with his baby.

To add to Jane's trauma, after she gives birth her baby is snatched from the hospital by a stranger, never to be seen again.

It is after the birth that Jane learns the medical reason she was disqualified from the space programme – she is intersex, and the hospital doctors force her to have gender reassignment surgery to make her male. Understandably, Jane blames her disappearing lover for all that has happened.

So far, so clear cut, but here is where it all gets confusing and very surprising. After hearing Jane's story – and learning Jane now goes by the name of John – the Bartender reveals he is a time traveller, and that he can help John get revenge on the man responsible. He believes that Jane's former lover is the man he has been tracking – The Fizzle Bomber – so gives John a gun and uses his time machine (it appears to be a violin case) to transport them back in time to the moment that Jane first met her lover.

Waiting for their former lover/the possible bomber, John instead meets their younger self, Jane, and it finally becomes clear that John is actually the man that Jane fell in love with.

Now stay with us here – that means that Jane is effectively their own lover as John is just a future version of Jane. The romance plays out all over again, with The Bartender watching, John eventually leaving their younger self, Jane, pregnant with their child.

But is John/Jane the Fizzle Bomber?

Predestination ending explained: Who is the Fizzle Bomber?

That's the main story explained, but we still don't know the identity of the bomber. While John and Jane have their relationship, The Bartender does a bit more time-travelling, even though his boss, Mr Robertson (Noah Taylor) advises him that too many jumps can lead to dementia and psychosis.

The Bartender's journeys make the story even more complex – it turns out he is the stranger in 1964 who steals Jane's baby from the hospital… and delivers it to the orphanage in 1945. So that means Jane/John is their own mother and father.

Robertson has an important part to play in all this too – as well as delivering a warning that the Bartender's brain may be going as loopy as the plot, he is also the man who initially recruited Jane for the space programme in the 1960s, indicating that he may be the only one in all of this who knows what the hell is going on.

While the Bartender wants to recruit John as his time-travel replacement, Robertson has another revelation to drop on us – yes, the Bartender is the future version of John/Jane, following that fiery opening scene in which his face was changed (see, we told you we'd get back to that).

It all makes sense – sort of – the Bartender is the perfect time-travelling cop, as he genuinely has no future or past and is in one giant twisty time loop. So Jane is John and their baby is also Jane/John, and after John leaves Jane he becomes a time travel agent, tries to stop the bomber, and then turns into the Bartender we later meet.

Oh, and one other thing – in the future, John/Jane/The Bartender is the Fizzle Bomber too!

You see, when Robertson mentioned that too much time travel makes your brain go fluffy, that should have been a big red flag as to what was to come – driven bonkers by all this back and forth, the Bartender has become a bomber in the future. And when the Bartender finally confronts his older, mad self, the Fizzle Bomber reveals to him that "if you shoot me, you become me".

The Bartender ignores this and shoots him, setting the whole story in motion again.

Predestination explained: What does it all mean?

To understand the movie, and all the twists and time-travel turns, it helps to remember what it is all meant to be about.

The major theme of the film is about how our experiences make us who we are, and how letting go of the past and accepting what we cannot change is one way of moving beyond it.

For example, if the Bartender had listened to his older Fizzle Bomber self and not shot him, the future would be changed and the Bomber – having not committed the murder – would not go on to start his deadly campaign.

Of course, the movie also features other themes including identity, who we are and how people see us, and how choice and deciding our own fates is so important.

Writer/directors Peter and Michael Spierig have spoken about what they wanted people to think about while watching the movie.

"The film's called Predestination so that gives you some idea of what's going on there," said Peter (via Collider ). "But are the events in the film always going to occur that way? Are they meant to occur that way? That's up to the audience to decide. But having said that, I personally think, even if we had choice, how could you ever know?"

"It's definitely a tragedy. We always thought of it as a really tragic love story. That was our intention from the beginning. But you also have to look at the person's life in this film as a person who has accomplished great things at a great cost.

"We talk about purpose in the film quite a bit. What is the purpose of someone's life? It may end up being heartbreaking and tragic; but on the way you do wonderful and extraordinary things at the sacrifice of sanity or love or whatever it is…"

Predestination is available to rent on Prime Video now.

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Freelance film & TV writer, Digital Spy Critic and writer Jo Berry has been writing about TV and movies since she began her career at Time Out aged 18. A regular on BBC Radio, Jo has written for titles including Empire, Maxim, Radio Times , OK! , The Guardian and Grazia , is the author of books including Chick Flicks and The Parents’ Guide to Kids’ Movies . 

She is also the editor of website Movies4Kids . In her career, Jo has interviewed well-known names including Beyonce, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Kiefer Sutherland, Tom Cruise and all the Avengers, spent many an hour crushed in the press areas of award show red carpets. Jo is also a self-proclaimed expert on Outlander and Brassic , and completely agrees that Die Hard is a Christmas movie .

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The 25 Greatest Time-Travel Movies Ever Made

It must say something, surely, about humans, how often time-travel movies are about returning to the past rather than jumping to the future. As Mark Duplass’s forlorn character says in Safety Not Guaranteed , “The mission has to do with regret.” With all the potential to explore the unknown world of the future, so often when our minds conspire to bend the rules of time it’s instead to rehash the old. It’s compelling to watch a character in a movie do what we cannot — right past wrongs or uncover the reason for or meaning behind the events in their lives, whether they be emotionally catastrophic or merely geopolitically motivated.

So absent is the future from the canon, in fact, that when it is involved, typically future dwellers are leaving their own time to come back to the present. Back to the Future Part II aside, it seems as if there’s something about going forward in time that just doesn’t track for humans. (Of course, you could argue that this is because the present-day concept of bidirectional time travel would infinitely multiply or change beyond recognition any future that may occur, but that’s a knot for another article.)

In any case, the time-travel stories deemed worthy of Hollywood budgets aren’t always straightforward in their mechanics. Some films on this list barely qualify as time-travel movies at all; others could hardly qualify as anything else. There are movies about trips through time but also ones about the bending and fracturing and muddying thereof; then there are those about, as Andy Samberg aptly puts it in Palm Springs , “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about.” There’s even a movie in which we get only 13 seconds’ worth of time travel, when it functions more like a joke whose punch line hits at the film’s climax.

What these films all do have in common is a fascination with changing the way time works. That being said, the list leaves out movies in larger, more extended franchises in which time meddling is a one-off dalliance thrown into a sequel with little by way of foreshadowing: think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , Avengers: Endgame , and Men in Black III . (It also leaves off perhaps the Ur-time-travel movie, Primer , and the quite good Midnight in Paris because their directors don’t deserve the column inches.) We’re looking at self-contained stories using time mechanics from the start, with preference given to those that involve themselves more intently with the ins and outs of time travel; that ask questions about time, aging, memory and so forth; and that try to succeed at it in new and interesting ways. So let’s get to it.

25. Galaxy Quest (1999)

Does Galaxy Quest really count as a time-travel movie? Some compelling reasons argue that it doesn’t: Time travel isn’t a major factor in the plot, and the time traveling that does occur is, yes, only a 13-second jump. But its use of time travel is meaningful insofar as the movie itself is a loving spoof of Star Trek , which makes use of time travel in three films ( one of which made this list ), not to mention dozens of episodes across its various TV iterations. Tacking on time travel as a deus ex machina for the actors in a Star Trek– like show pressed into service as an actual space crew by an endangered alien race is the exact right amount of ribbing in a movie that’s as on point as it is hilarious.

Galaxy Quest is available to rent on Amazon .

24. Happy Death Day (2017)

Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie. Most of the entries on this list are covered in enough feel-good spin to land as comedies, but Happy Death Day stares the horror of the time-loop phenomenon right in the face. (It’s also quite funny.) Reliving the same day over and over is an unimaginably potent form of psychological torture, and adding murder to the equation does little to dull that edge. The film follows a college-age protagonist struggling to escape from a masked slasher hell-bent on killing her again and again while she tries to solve the mystery of how she got stuck in a time loop.

Happy Death Day is available to rent on Amazon .

23. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Seriously, this may be the only good movie in which the film’s whole focus is using a time machine to travel into the future. The fact that it’s a sequel is telling — the characters already traveled into the past in the first movie , and the filmmakers decided to save “traveling even further into the past“ for the third film in the trilogy. Still, Back to the Future Part II is a fun time that makes great use of sight gags and references, recasting scenes from the first film in the distant future year of 2015 with all its hoverboards and self-lacing Nikes.

Back to the Future Part II is available to rent on Amazon .

22. See You Yesterday (2019)

It’s a dirty little secret of time-travel movies that they tend to be, well, pretty white. Tenet ’s Protagonist aside, if Hollywood’s sending someone through time, they’re almost certainly not a Black person, and for obvious reasons: Most of post-contact North American history is deeply unfriendly to people of color, and the problems a person running around out of time and place is going to encounter are deeply compounded if they’ll likely be the target of racist abuse or violence — which makes See You Yesterday all the more compelling. Produced by Spike Lee and featuring one of filmdom’s most famous time travelers in a cameo role, it follows a Black teenage science prodigy who uses a time machine to try to save her brother from being killed by a police officer.

See You Yesterday is streaming on Netflix .

21. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

No offense to the Back to the Future franchise, but time travel never looks more fun on film than it does in the first Bill & Ted movie. It’s a concept that feels distinctly of a different era, so pure is its zaniness, that it’s hard to imagine anyone concocting it today. The titular duo, Californian high-school students in the ’80s, travel through the past looking for historical figures in order to ace a history project, then bring them all back to the present. High jinks ensue! We get Genghis Khan in a sporting-goods store and Mozart on an electric keyboard. What more could you want?

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is streaming on HBO Max .

20. Source Code (2011)

Time-travel-film aficionados know this won’t be Jake Gyllenhaal’s only stop on this list, but no matter. Source Code finds him repeating the same eight minutes over and over as he struggles to find the culprit in a train bombing — with each replay ending in his own death by explosion. For some reason, a romantic subplot is shoehorned into this, along with a bunch of frankly unnecessary technical mumbo-jumbo, but the core idea is a compelling mix of the time-loop movie and the train whodunit that Gyllenhaal is a perfect fit for.

Source Code is available to rent on Amazon .

19. 12 Monkeys (1995)

Some sort of law of nature dictates that every genuinely good idea and/or piece of true art has to at some point be turned into a Hollywood movie. Thank God La Jetée was adapted into something that can stand on its own feet artistically. 12 Monkeys may not retain its source material’s black-and-white look or stripped-down, static-image presentation, but it is a rollicking good time nonetheless. That’s in no small part due to director Terry Gilliam getting the best out of Bruce Willis and a young Brad Pitt, and recasting World War III as a planet-decimating virus. Which, like at least one other movie on this list , “speaks to the present moment,” or whatever.

12 Monkeys is available to rent on Amazon .

18. Run Lola Run (1998)

Unlike almost all of the other films on this list, the terms time travel and time machine don’t show up anywhere in Run Lola Run . Rather, it’s a sort of de facto time-loop scenario in which the protagonist tries repeatedly to pay a ransom to save her boyfriend’s life. In fact, if not for a few key details, it could easily be characterized (and often has been) as an alternate-endings movie rather than a time-travel film. But the fact that Lola seems to be learning from her past attempts with each successive one suggests that she is, indeed, using knowledge gained from previous loops to bring a satisfactory end to this situation.

Run Lola Run is available to rent on Amazon .

17. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

One of the most striking things about Groundhog Day is the mutability and replicability of its core conceit. Perhaps the best case in point is Edge of Tomorrow , sometimes known as Live. Die. Repeat. after its original tagline. It’s the kind of physically grueling movie only an actor as genuinely unhinged as Tom Cruise could pull off. A noncombatant thrust into a war against invading aliens, Cruise’s character finds himself reliving day one of combat over and over, slowly but surely refining his techniques in order to survive the extraterrestrial onslaught. Like the central twosome in the much less violent Palm Springs , he winds up with a partner in (war) crime, teaming up with the similarly time-trapped Emily Blunt, and the explanation for the replay glitch here is actually pretty satisfying.

Edge of Tomorrow is streaming on Fubo TV .

16. Star Trek (2009)

If you could create some sort of an advanced stat to measure controversy generated per unit of interesting filmmaking decisions, J.J. Abrams would have to be near the top in terms of his ability to rig up movie drama from almost nothing. This is a guy whose filmography is like Godzilla rip-off, Spielberg homage, safe reboot of cherished IP, repeat. Star Trek may be his best film, though, a sure-footed reinvention of a dorky sci-fi franchise that made it, well, cool. Somehow, the beauty of Spock and Kirk’s bromance being woven through chance encounters with future selves kind of … works?

Star Trek is available to rent on Amazon .

15. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

There’s a relative dearth of time travel in animated film, which perhaps is a function simply of the fact that it’s less impressive to stage in a world that’s already unreal. If you can Looney Tunes your way through physics, what’s so special about grabbing the flow of time and tying it into a bow? Still, the original Girl Who Leapt Through Time deserves mention here. It’s a beautiful story that interlaces the complexity of time leaping with the intensity of teenage emotion and the thorny process of growing up where the opportunity to redo things leads, over time, to growth — a less shitty Groundhog Day , in a way.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is available to rent on Amazon .

14. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

She may not be the most famous, decorated, or emulated actress of her generation, but Aubrey Plaza is someone whose personality spoke to the irony-soaked 2010s in a way that simply could not be denied. Her character on Parks and Recreation , April Ludgate, was, by all accounts, created specifically to channel Plaza’s real-life personality to the screen, and she plays essentially the same character in Safety Not Guaranteed . Here, she’s a sarcastic intern at a magazine working on a story about a would-be time traveler and using her feminine wiles to slowly gain his trust. The chemistry between Plaza and Mark Duplass is probably the film’s high point; the subplot about the FBI feels like it was clipped out of a bad X-Files episode.

Safety Not Guaranteed is streaming on Tubi .

13. La Jetée (1962)

At only a 28-minute run time, La Jetée is arguably too short to merit inclusion on this list. However, what it lacks in content (and in, well, moving images; it’s almost exclusively a collection of static black-and-white shots set to voice-over), it more than makes up for in inventiveness and influence, and it would be a travesty to leave it out in favor of more recent by-the-book fare. Tracing the tale of a man held prisoner in post-WWIII Paris being used in time-travel experiments as his captors seek to remedy the postapocalyptic state of the world, he’s sent into both the future and the past and ends up unraveling a lifelong personal mystery while he’s at it.

La Jetée is streaming on the Criterion Channel .

12. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Unlike the worse but more straightforwardly time-traveling Tim Burton remake, the relationship between the original Planet of the Apes and time travel is inexact — technically, the astronaut crew that lands on the titular planet does travel forward 2,000 years, but it’s not done via a time machine. The travel isn’t instantaneous: It literally does take them 2,000 years to get there; they’re just unconscious and on life support. Still, the way the film’s ending handles the iconic reveal is exactly in line with the best of the time-travel canon, the telescoping, mise en abyme feeling of the world shifting in front of your very eyes without your moving an inch.

Planet of the Apes is available to rent on Amazon .

11. Groundhog Day (1993)

The famous Bill Murray vehicle essentially invented the infinite-time-loop genre (and it’s hardly a movie that succeeds on the strength of its concept alone), but the idea at its core is so steeped in the casual misogyny of late-’80s and early-’90s cinema that it’s hard to watch today without cringing. Murray’s character employing what amounts to PUA-style techniques over and over and over in a desperate bid to fuck his hapless co-worker just doesn’t hit the way it did back then. If the story arc didn’t present a guy detoxifying himself of the worst aspects of masculinity in order to be worthy of a woman’s love as the primary way for a 20th-century white man to achieve full personhood, this would be much higher on the list.

Groundhog Day is streaming on Starz .

10. Predestination (2014)

This is probably the most complicated film on the list. Following a “temporal agent” (played by Ethan Hawke) who’s trying to prevent a bombing in 1970s New York, it’s based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story and features Shiv Roy herself, Sarah Snook, in a star-making turn as someone with a complicated backstory and a secret. Like the best sci-fi, the film’s premise raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the titular concept and throws in some interesting musings on sex, gender, and the self in the process.

Predestination is streaming on Tubi .

9. Looper (2012)

Wes Anderson gets a lot of flak for his overwrought twee visuals, but Rian Johnson has a knack for making movies that feel and function like dioramas even if they don’t look it. Narratively speaking, everything here is constructed just so — and there’s a certain beauty in that — but who ever had a profound experience of art by looking at a diorama? Looper was probably Johnson’s least precious pre– Star Wars film, which is nice because the temptation to drastically overmaneuver the mechanics of a time-travel story can lead to disaster. The tech used to Bruce Willis–ify Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face is distracting, and the third act’s retreat from the postapocalyptic city of the future to the postapocalyptic corn farm of the future is a brave choice that the film struggles to land. Still, Johnson’s vision of a future in which organized crime runs time travel is compelling and well worth a watch.

Looper is streaming on Netflix .

8. Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko is a bit of a genre mash-up. Part high-school movie, part sci-fi flick, part bleak meditation on the soullessness of late-’80s America, it’s nevertheless a weirdly successful piece of filmmaking that makes fantastic use of a young Jake Gyllenhaal, a great supporting cast (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone, and Patrick Swayze among others), and an absolutely iconic haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” Watching high schoolers navigate parallel universes, wormholes, and time travel is a dicey proposition, but director Richard Kelly makes it work, somehow.

Donnie Darko is streaming on HBO Max .

7. Back to the Future (1984)

While it’s clearly superior to the sequel (and leagues ahead of the final film in the trilogy), the original Back to the Future is a bit of a mess (John Mulaney was right , to be honest). Its racial and gender politics are cringey, and the incest subplot is weird (“It’s your cousin Marvin. Marvin Pornhub . You know that new plot element you’ve been looking for?”), but there’s a clear interest in time travel beyond its shimmering surface: the very real addressing of the “grandfather problem” in time travel via the slow disappearance of Marty from his family photo, the accidental invention of rock music, and a genuine curiosity about the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of time machines. Ahh, what the hell. It’s a romp.

Back to the Future is available to rent on Amazon .

6. Palm Springs (2020)

No offense to Gen-Xers and boomers, but the best time-loop movie of all time is Palm Springs . The film isn’t without its missteps, but it’s much more curious about life than Groundhog Day was through the eyes of Murray’s misanthrope. Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg‘s characters, stuck in the loop together, are a perfect comedic match, and their shared humanity makes for a beautiful arc. The film raises questions about what’s worth doing in life when nothing lasts and how to stay sane when every day is the same. Of course, as a sort of polar opposite of Tenet , it benefited from coming out during the pandemic by speaking, as it does, to the experience of lockdown.

Palm Springs is streaming on Hulu .

5. Tenet (2020)

Interstellar wasn’t enough for Chris Nolan, apparently. Tenet ’s legacy may end up being little more than that of the COVID action movie no one saw — a bloated thriller that Nolan fought to get into theaters and bar from home viewing reportedly to swell the size of his own pockets. It really did suffer from bad timing, though, because this is genuinely a quintessential big-screen popcorn movie whose absurdity is all the more palatable when it’s given the audiovisual bombast it deserves. Ambitious in scope as it traces a war on the past by the future (yes, you read that right), Tenet is as enamored of action tropes as it is in bucking them, and its investment in rendering visible the brain-bendingly knotty mechanics of moving through time is laudable, even when the movie itself remains opaque — as impenetrable as the future, as hazy as the past.

Tenet is streaming on HBO Max .

4. The Terminator (1984)

A partner to Blade Runner in the mid-’80s invention of sci-fi noir, The Terminator is a stunning film in many ways, despite the third act’s now-iffy visual effects. While it’s not James Cameron’s debut, and it would go on to be bested by its sequel , it functions as an incredible showcase for an emerging young director who would exclusively make big stories for the rest of his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the relentless, unemotional killer cyborg sent back from the future to terminate the mother of the eventual resistance leader, and the film’s romantic subplot has just the perfect amount of time-travel-induced cheesiness for it to work.

The Terminator is streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

3. Interstellar (2014)

It’s not inaccurate to say Christopher Nolan is a director who’s more interested in scale and scope than in expressing the minutiae of the human experience in its purest form. But in Interstellar, a Nolan movie in its titular ambitions, there’s a core element of time travel wrought not as sci-fi fireworks but as a paean to the sheer force and will of the power of love. It both does and doesn’t work, depending on your capacity for cheese in space, but even besides that, Nolan’s use of time as story arc — the way Miller’s planet functions, in particular — is conceptually masterful in the best kind of time-travel-movie way.

Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+ .

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Whereas the franchise’s first movie spends more time on the question of time travel, in the second it takes a bit of a back seat to the action itself. It’s hard to fault director James Cameron for this decision; T2 remains one of the best action movies of the ’90s and — along with Jurassic Park and The Matrix — one of the decade’s best when for special effects. The groundbreaking T-1000 would honestly be enough to get this movie on the list; a tween John Connor grappling with questions of predestination and the fact that he is vicariously responsible for his own conception feel almost like icing on the time-travel cake. Much as in 12 Monkeys , time travel here is mistaken for delusion, as valiant Sarah Connor, in a Cassandra-esque nightmare, has to battle against the future only she knows is coming. Of course, Cassandra never had access to any firepower stored in underground desert arsenals.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is streaming on Netflix .

1. Arrival (2016)

It’s fair to wonder whether Arrival really is, in fact, a time-travel movie. The Ted Chiang short story it’s based on isn’t about time travel per se; rather, it’s an exploration of alternate forms of temporal understanding. The linguist protagonist, played by Amy Adams, doesn’t travel through time so much as come to experience it differently. Still, the plot ends up hinging on foreknowledge that she is granted not via visions but by actually experiencing her future simultaneously with her present and past. For our purposes, though, that’s time fuckery enough to merit inclusion, and boy howdy does the film deliver in overall quality. Partly, that’s simply a question of the source material. Chiang is arguably the most talented (and possibly the most decorated) American sci-fi writer of his generation. But the source story is not especially Hollywood friendly, and director Denis Villeneuve has adopted it lovingly, borrowing a plot device from another of Chiang’s stories, the more straightforwardly time-travel-based “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” in order to add some third-act blockbuster flavor. The result is a beautiful meditation on love, choice, and courage that packs art-film ethos into a genuine sci-fi blockbuster.

Arrival is streaming on Hulu and Paramount+ .

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Total Recall

15 must-see time travel movies, with mr. peabody & sherman hitting theaters, we run down some of the most memorable journeys across time and space..

Back to the Future

Great Scott! On one hand, Back to the Future is quintessentially 1980s — you’ve got Huey Lewis on the soundtrack, Michael J. Fox in the lead, and a DeLorean for a time machine — but on the other, it’s a charmingly old-fashioned comedy that sends its hero back in time as much to save his own father from growing up to be a schmuck as it does to laugh along with the audience at the many ways in which American pop culture changed between 1955 and 1985. The sequels had their moments, but it’s the original that still really hits the spot; as Adam Smith wrote for Empire Magazine, “To put it bluntly: if you don’t like Back to the Future , it’s difficult to believe that you like films at all.”

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Two teenage idiots, George Carlin, and a magic phone booth. They don’t sound like the most likely ingredients for cinematic glory, but then there’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure , starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as our two non-intrepid heroes, a pair of high school buddies destined for greatness — but only if they can pass an upcoming history test. They get a little extra help courtesy of Rufus (Carlin), a citizen of the future utopian society inspired by the music Bill & Ted go on to record, who travels back in time to help them study by giving them some most excellent face time with historical figures like Napoleon, Socrates, Billy the Kid, and Abraham Lincoln. Not the most serious fare ever spun from the time-travel premise, but it works; as Larry Carroll wrote for Counting Down, “This is the rare kind of movie that you could watch along with your kids and actually feel like you’re teaching them something.”

Donnie Darko

Time travel, a falling jet engine, and a dude in a bunny suit: From these disparate ingredients, writer-director Richard Kelly wove the tale of Donnie Darko , a suburban teenager (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) charged with repairing a rift in the fabric of our dimension. Or something. To call Darko “open to interpretation” would be understating the case a bit — it’s been alternately confounding and delighting audiences since it was released in 2001 — but its dense, ambiguous plot found stronger purchase with critics, who cared less about what it all meant than about simply having the chance to see an American movie that took some substantial risks. Though a few reviewers were confused and/or unimpressed (Staci Lynne Wilson of Fantastica Daily called it “derivative,” and Joe Leydon dismissed it as “a discombobulating muddle” in his write-up for the San Francisco Examiner), overall critical opinion proved a harbinger of the cult status the film would eventually enjoy on the home video market; as Thomas Delapa wrote for the Boulder Weekly, “If the sum total of Donnie Darko is hard to figure, there’s no questioning that its separate scenes add up to breathtaking filmmaking.” Despite a paltry $4.1 million gross during its original limited run, Darko returned to theaters in 2004 with a director’s cut — one whose 91 percent Tomatometer actually improved upon the original’s.

Groundhog Day

Under the right circumstances, time travel sounds like quite a bit of fun. Finding yourself trapped in a time loop in Punxsutawney, PA, on the other hand, is a living nightmare — at least for Phil Connors (Bill Murray), the obnoxious newscaster at the heart of director Harold Ramis’ classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day . But for the audience, Connors’ torment is an invitation to cinematic bliss — first courtesy of Murray’s perfectly deadpan depiction of the callous Connors, then through his progressively more unhinged reaction to the discovery that he’s doomed to repeat the same 24 hours of his life seemingly forever, and then finally in his expected (but no less sweet) moments of self-discovery in the final act. “ Groundhog Day may not be the funniest collaboration between Bill Murray and director Harold Ramis,” admitted the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan. “Yet this gentle, small-scale effort is easily the most endearing film of both men’s careers, a sweet and amusing surprise package.”

Hot Tub Time Machine

The 1980s got kind of a bum rap at the time, but that hasn’t stopped those of us who grew up during the decade from giving in to nostalgia during the 21st century, or from fetishizing the era’s best films — which is why it was such a winkingly self-referential treat to see 1980s hero John Cusack lead an ensemble cast through Hot Tub Time Machine , director Steve Pink’s ribald comedy about a group of schlubby friends given a surprise chance (via magic hot tub, natch) to revisit the best years of their lives. It’s an unabashedly goofy premise, but screenwriter Josh Heald manages to leave the whimsy with a few dashes of surprising poignancy; as Laremy Legel wrote for Film.com, “Well played, Hot Tub Time Machine , well played. You defied expectations, in a good way, and managed to evolve from ‘potentially silly concept’ to ‘fairly funny film.'”

Plenty of people would love to take the opportunity to travel back in time and see our younger selves, but Rian Johnson’s Looper takes this premise and adds a nasty twist. When a hit man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) realizes his latest quarry is his older self (Bruce Willis) — an event known among his peers as “closing the loop” — he muffs the job, allowing him(self) to escape and setting in motion a high-stakes pursuit that puts a widening circle of people in danger. Tense, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, Looper may suffer from some of the same scientific story flaws as other time travel movies, but it also manages to turn its by-now-familiar basic ingredients into an uncommonly affecting and thought-provoking sci-fi drama. “ Looper imagines a world just near enough to look familiar,” mused Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, “and just futuristic enough to be chillingly askew.”

Like any genre, science fiction has its share of clichés — and anything relating to time travel probably belongs on that list. But few films have ever dealt with time travel — or the many personal and ethical questions that could arise from ownership of the technology — with the level of intelligence that Shane Carruth’s ultra low-budget Primer brought to the table. The story of two garage scientists who accidentally build a time machine, Primer eschews whiz-bang special effects for a nuts-and-bolts look at the science behind the device, and a cold, hard look at how quickly and easily a friendship can be torn asunder by unchecked power and bottomless greed. It certainly isn’t for everyone — the reams of technical dialogue prompted critics such as the BBC’s Matthew Leyland to dismiss it as “one of the most willfully obscure sci-fi movies ever made” — but if you can absorb the material, it’s uncommonly gripping. Time Out’s Jessica Winter was appreciative, saying “this film imagines its viewers to be smart, possessed of a decent attention span and game for a challenge. It doesn’t happen all that often.”

Somewhere in Time

Time travel has been used as a plot device to set up all kinds of stories, but rarely has it been employed with the sort of three-handkerchief weepie abandon brought to bear on 1980’s Somewhere in Time . Starring Christopher Reeve as a starry-eyed playwright accosted by a mysterious older woman who pleads with him to “come back to me” before pressing a locket into his hand and disappearing, Time slowly morphs into a fantastical tale about coming unmoored in time via self-hypnosis in order to be with the one you love — even if that love is inspired by a portrait of someone you don’t remember ever knowing. A divisive cult classic, Time has always been dismissed by less patient or romantically inclined viewers, but for others, it’s well worth watching. “Above all,” argued Apollo Guide’s Ryan Cracknell, “this film captures a romantic part of the imagination that is often left unexplored.”

Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home

Having explored the outer limits of space, Star Trek spent much of its fourth cinematic installment in decidedly more familiar environs — namely, the America (specifically the San Francisco bay area) of 1986, thanks to a storyline, conceived by returning director Nimoy, that had the crew of the Enterprise traveling 600 years back in time to retrieve a humpback whale in order to… Well, it isn’t important, really; what mattered — at least to the folks who helped Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home to a $133 million worldwide gross — was that it lived up to Nimoy’s goal of showing audiences “a great time” with a feature that played up the lighter side of a franchise whose humor was often overshadowed by its big ideas. Weathering a number of pre-production storms — including William Shatner’s refusal to come back without a raise and the chance to direct the next sequel — Voyage triumphantly emerged as what Roger Ebert referred to as “easily the most absurd of the Star Trek stories — and yet, oddly enough… also the best, the funniest and the most enjoyable in simple human terms.”

The Terminator

It was made with a fraction of the mega-budget gloss that enveloped its sequels, but for many, 1984’s The Terminator remains the pinnacle of the franchise — not to mention one of the most purely enjoyable movies of the last 30 years. Subsequent entries would get a little hard to follow, but the original’s premise was simple enough: A scary-looking cyborg (Schwarzenegger) travels back in time to kill a woman (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to the child who will grow up to lead the human resistance against an evil network of sentient machines. Tech noir at its most accessible, Terminator earned universal praise from critics such as Sean Axmaker of Turner Classic Movies, who wrote, “Gritty, clever, breathlessly paced, and dynamic despite the dark shadow of doom cast over the story, this sci-fi thriller remains one of the defining American films of the 1980s.”

Time After Time

What if H.G. Wells really built a time machine — and what if Jack the Ripper used it to flee into the future? That’s the intriguing premise behind Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time , starring Malcolm McDowell as Wells and David Warner as the killer. After Jack travels to 1979, Wells pursues him, setting in motion a cat-and-mouse thriller, culture-clash comedy, and love story all in one, with a dash of sharp social commentary thrown in for good measure. “ Time After Time is still a fun fish-out-of-water flick that deserves more attention than it has received in the thirty years following its release,” wrote Simon Miraudo for Quickflix. “But there’s still plenty of time for that.”

Time Bandits

Terry Gilliam and time travel: A match made in cinematic heaven. Years before he proved it for a second time with the much darker 12 Monkeys , Gilliam directed a far sillier — and visually dazzling — venture into the genre with 1981’s Time Bandits , uniting a stellar cast (including Shelley Duvall, John Cleese, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, and Sean Connery) in service of a deceptively thought-provoking caper about an 11-year-old history buff (Craig Warnock) on a journey through time with a group of dwarves. A solid critical and commercial hit, Bandits proved a favorite for writers like Roger Ebert, who pronounced it “amazingly well-produced” and applauded, “The historic locations are jammed with character and detail. This is the only live-action movie I’ve seen that literally looks like pages out of Heavy Metal magazine.”

In a career dotted with cult classics, 1994’s Timecop manages to stand out as one of the cultiest. And okay, so it’s hard to call a movie that raked in more than $100 million worldwide a “cult” picture — but if you’ve seen the way Timecop takes a cool premise (time travel, natch) and renders it both impenetrably complicated and irrelevant to the action, you know it’s essentially the very definition of the term. (Also, it stars Ron Silver.) The plot is full of holes, but as the filmmakers knew, once you accept the notion of Jean-Claude Van Damme as an officer of the Time Enforcement Commission, you can buy into pretty much anything, and by the time you get to Timecop ‘s final act — in which past and future versions of Van Damme battle past and future versions of Silver — you’ve reached that wonderful place where the laws of logic no longer exist. The highest-grossing movie of Van Damme’s career, Timecop spun off a sequel, a short-lived television show, and even a series of books. Not bad for a movie that Roger Ebert described as “the kind of movie that is best not thought about at all, for that way madness lies.”

The Time Machine

This isn’t the only time Hollywood’s tried adapting H.G. Wells’ classic story, but it’s definitely the best. Starring Rod Taylor as the Victorian time-traveling scientist George and featuring Oscar-winning special effects from Gene Warren and Tim Baar, director George Pal’s version of The Time Machine might seem somewhat quaint by today’s standards; still, whatever it lacks in modern-day visual pizzazz, it more than makes up in the stuff that matters — right down to Wells’ vision of a distant post-human future populated by docile creatures and the monstrous Morlocks who use them for food. It’s “Somewhat dated, and not quite up to the source material,” admitted Luke Y. Thompson of New Times, “but still some good retro fun.”

Any time director Terry Gilliam manages to wrangle one of his films through the studio system, it’s a cause for celebration — and that goes double for a picture like 12 Monkeys , which almost seamlessly weds Gilliam’s signature flights of fancy with good old-fashioned commercialism to produce a knotty time travel story starring a pair of matinee idols (Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt) in an apocalyptic thriller that never stops asking questions — or forcing the audience to answer their own as they hustle to keep up with the unfolding drama. “There’s always overripe method to his madness,” observed Janet Maslin for the New York Times, “but in the new 12 Monkeys Mr. Gilliam’s methods are uncommonly wrenching and strong.”

Take a look through the rest of our Total Recall archives . And don’t forget to check out Mr. Peabody & Sherman .

Finally, here’s what happened when Peabody and Sherman met Ludwig Van Beethoven:

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What is the grandfather paradox?

Can you go back in time and kill an ancestor without creating a logical paradox? Surprisingly, the answer may be yes.

Grandfather paradox explained

• Is it possible?
• Parallel worlds

Grandfather paradox solved?

Grandfather paradox and the butterfly effect.

• Additional resoources

Bibliography

The grandfather paradox is a self-contradictory situation that arises in some time travel scenarios that is illustrated by the impossible scenario in which a person travels back in time only to kill their grandfather (who could no longer go on to produce one's parent, and hence where does that leave you and your ancestor-killing event?). The paradox is sometimes taken as an argument against the logical possibility of traveling backward in time, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Within the framework of modern physics, however, there are ways to avoid the paradox without dispensing with time travel altogether.

Related: 5 sci-fi concepts that are possible (in theory)

Let's suppose you have a time machine that allows you to travel back into the past. While you're there, you accidentally kill one of your grandparents — or any other direct ancestor — before they have any offspring. That would alter a whole chain of future events, including your own birth, which would no longer happen. But if you weren't born in the future, then you couldn't kill your ancestor in the past — hence the paradox. It's a scenario that became popular in the science-fiction magazines of the 1920s and 1930s, according to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction , and the name "grandfather paradox" was firmly established by 1950.

Actually, you don't even need to kill anyone; there are many other ways you could change history that would result in your future non-existence. Perhaps the best known example is the movie "Back to the Future," in which the time-traveling protagonist inadvertently drives a wedge between his parents before they were married — and then has to work frantically to bring them together again.

Is the grandfather paradox possible?

Moving from science fiction to science fact, one person who was eminently qualified to talk about the realities of time travel was the late Stephen Hawking, arguably the most brilliant physicist of recent times. In 1999, he gave a lecture on "space and time warps," which showed how Einstein 's theory of general relativity might make time travel possible, by bending space-time back on itself. 

One theoretical possibility that would allow time travel (and thus the ability to somehow kill off a critical ancestor) is a special kind of wormhole . Among the most dramatic consequences of general relativity, wormholes are often described as shortcuts between one point in space and another. But, as Hawking explained in his lecture, a wormhole could possibly loop back to an earlier point in time — a situation technically known as a "closed time-like curve" (CTC).

But if physics allows backward time travel, wouldn't the grandfather paradox still cause issues? Hawking suggested two possible ways to get around the paradox in this scenario. First, there's what he referred to as the "consistent histories" model, in which the whole of time — past, present and future — is rigidly predetermined; in that way, you can only travel back to an earlier point in time if you had already been there in your own history. In this "block universe" model, as it's sometimes called, one could travel to the past but doing so would not alter it, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation . Taking this view, the grandfather paradox could never arise. With Hawking's second option, on the other hand, the situation is more subtle.

Grandfather paradox and parallel worlds

This second approach to traveling back in time invokes quantum physics , where an event may have several possible outcomes with different likelihoods of occurring.

As described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory sees all these various outcomes as occurring in different, "parallel" timelines. In this view, the grandfather paradox could be resolved if the time traveler starts out in a timeline where their grandfather lived long enough to have children, and then — after going back and killing their forebear — continue along a parallel time track in which they will never be born. ( Stanford Encyclopedia has a more detailed look at why you can’t jump back and forth between parallel timelines at will.) As Hawking pointed out in his 1999 lecture, this seems to be the implicit assumption behind sci-fi treatments such as "Back to the Future."

At the time that movie was made in 1985, the "parallel world" explanation of the grandfather paradox was merely a philosophical conjecture. In 1991, however, it was put on firmer ground by the physicist David Deutsch, as New Scientist reported at the time. Deutsch showed that, while parallel timelines are normally incapable of interacting with each other, the situation changes in the vicinity of a closed time-like curve (CTC), when a wormhole curves back on itself. Here, just as the sci-fi writers imagined, the different timelines are able to cross over — so that when a CTC loops back into the past, it's the past of a different timeline. If that's proven, then you really could kill an infant grandparent without paradoxically eliminating yourself in the process. In that case, your grandfather would never have existed only in one parallel world. And you, the grandfather-killer, would only have existed in the other.

As surprising as it sounds, there's actually some experimental support for Deutsch's solution to the grandfather paradox. In 2014, a team at the University of Queensland examined a simpler time-travel scenario that entailed a similar logical paradox. The researchers described the work in their paper published that year in the journal Nature Communications . The idea was that a subatomic particle had to go back in time to flip the switch that resulted in its creation; if the switch wasn't flipped, the particle would never exist in the first place.

A key feature of Deutsch's theory is that the various probabilities have to be self-consistent. For instance, in the Queensland research example, if there's a 50:50 chance the particle travels back in time, then there must also be a 50:50 chance that the switch gets flipped to create that particle in the first place. In the absence of a time machine, the researchers set up an experiment involving a pair of photons, which they claimed was logically equivalent to a single photon traveling back in time to "create" itself. The experiment was a success, with the results validating Deutsch's self-consistency theory.

Killing your grandfather when he was a child is a sure-fire way to ensure you're never born. But there are also subtler possibilities for messing up the timeline. In a sufficiently complex system, even the tiniest change can have serious long-term consequences — as in the butterfly effect , by which the flapping of a butterfly's wings can eventually trigger a tornado thousands of miles away. Sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury produced a time travel counterpart to this in his 1952 story "A Sound of Thunder," which can be read online at the Internet Archive . Bradbury's protagonist travels back to the time of the dinosaurs , where he accidentally steps on a butterfly — then returns to the present to find society changed beyond recognition. It's easy to imagine that, if the societal changes were sweeping enough, the time traveler might have prevented his own birth as surely as if he'd slain a grandparent.

But would that really be the case, using the quantum approach to the grandfather paradox? Recent work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory indicates that the course of history is more resilient than the butterfly effect might suggest. The researchers used a quantum computer to simulate time travel into the past, where a piece of information was deliberately damaged — the computational equivalent of stepping on a Jurassic-era butterfly. But unlike Bradbury's story, the knock-on effect in the "present" of the computer simulation turned out to be relatively small and insignificant. That, of course, is great news for would-be time travelers. As long as you refrain from blatantly silly acts like killing a direct ancestor, it may be possible to go back in time without any paradoxical consequences at all.

Additional resources

• Watch a YouTube video about the science behind the grandfather paradox
• Take Ten Short Lessons in time travel from Brian Clegg
• Explore dozens of fictional time travel paradoxes at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia and TV Tropes

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. https://sfdictionary.com/view/2178/grandfather-paradox

"Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/  

"Time Travel without the Paradoxes," New Scientist, 1992. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13318143-000-science-time-travel-without-the-paradoxes/

"The block universe theory, where time travel is possible but time passing is an illusion," Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-09-02/block-universe-theory-time-past-present-future-travel/10178386  

"Experimental simulation of closed timelike curves," Nature Communications, 2014. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms5145  

"A Sound of Thunder," Ray Bradbury, Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/Planet_Stories_v06n04_1954-01/page/n5/mode/2up

"Simulating quantum 'time travel' disproves butterfly effect in quantum realm," Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2020. https://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2020/July/0728-quantum-time-travel.php

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Andrew May holds a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Manchester University, U.K. For 30 years, he worked in the academic, government and private sectors, before becoming a science writer where he has written for Fortean Times, How It Works, All About Space, BBC Science Focus, among others. He has also written a selection of books including Cosmic Impact and Astrobiology: The Search for Life Elsewhere in the Universe, published by Icon Books.

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Giant Freakin Robot

The Sci-Fi Mind-Bender On Hulu Is The Most Original Time Travel Movie In Years

Posted: February 16, 2024 | Last updated: February 16, 2024

For sci-fi fans, there’s something ironic about time travel movies: after you watch enough of them, you may feel caught in your own time loop because all of the films feel more or less the same. That’s why it’s always special to discover such a movie that feels fresh and original, and if you’ve been on the lookout for a time travel movie that feels completely innovative, you’re in luck. Aporia is now streaming on Hulu, and its fresh take on someone turning back the clock is one that will keep you riveted from beginning to end.

Time Travel, As Always, Yields Mixed Results

What is Aporia about, exactly? Without giving too many of its twists and turns away, this is a movie about a woman grieving the death of her husband. He was killed by a drunk driver, but through the magic of time travel, she has the opportunity to save his life–a noble intention that, as you might expect, unleashes some seriously unintended consequences for herself and many others.

Trading One Life For Another

What makes Aporia’s take on time travel feel so fresh, though? Unlike most other science fiction films where characters attempt to alter the past, the grieving widow is unable to personally transport herself back through the veil of years. Instead, she has the opportunity to send a subatomic particle backwards to a specific point in time, and if that particle should appear inside somebody, they will instantly die.

For all intents and purposes, this gives her an opportunity to send a sci-fi bullet into the past and kill the man who killed her husband before he drunkenly steps behind the wheel. That automatically makes Aporia much darker than your typical time travel movie, but by the time she’s ready to pull the trigger, it’s hard not to sympathize with her actions. Once we see that the drunk driver both feels no remorse and experiences no major legal consequences for his fatally negligent actions, it’s clear that zapping him out of the timestream may be the closest thing the widow gets to seeing justice.

Familiar Faces To Sci-Fi Fans

We keep comparing Aporia to other sci-fi movies, and if you’re a fan of the genre, you’re definitely going to love the cast. The widow is played by Judy Greer, someone known for appearing in sci-fi blockbusters like Ant-Man, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (voice only), and many more. The dead husband she hopes to save is played by Edi Gathegi, someone known for appearing in killer sci-fi show For All Mankind, played the mutant Darwin in X-Men: First Class, and who will appear next year in Superman: Legacy, James Gunn’s inaugural film meant to kick off the new DCU.

A Critical Darling

In case you were wondering, we’re not the only ones who instantly fell in love with Aporia. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently has a critical rating of 89 percent, a score which is that much more impressive when you consider how critics often can’t wrap their minds around science fiction. In this case, critics specifically praised Aporia for effortlessly blending its hard sci-fi premise with understandably human motivations and almost heartbreakingly emotional performances.

See For Yourself How Original Aporia Is

Once you experience Aporia, the only downside is that you’ll wish you could travel back in time and watch it again for the very first time. It’s currently available to stream on Hulu, and we’re confident that once you stream it, this film will blow you away. On the off chance that it doesn’t, however, we’re going to need you to promise not to blow us away with a subatomic particle…at least, not until we’ve watched Madame Web and are finally ready to die before the next crappy Sony superhero movie is announced.

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Screen Rant

Adam project director explains time travel in ryan reynolds' new movie.

The Adam Project director/producer Shawn Levy explains the rules of the time travel featured in his and Ryan Reynolds' new Netflix movie.

The Adam Project director/producer Shawn Levy explains the rules of the time travel featured in his and Ryan Reynolds' new Netflix movie. Long before the  Free Guy  creative duo came aboard the sci-fi adventure, T.S. Nowlin's spec script had been acquired by Tom Cruise with the intention to star with Paramount Pictures eyeing an acquisition under its previous title Our Name is Adam . After nearly a decade of lingering in development hell, Netflix would later pick up the rights to the project with Levy attached to direct and produce and Reynolds attached to star and produce in mid-2020.

Reynolds stars in  The Adam Project  as Adam Reed, a time-traveling test pilot who ventures back to meet his younger self and his late father in an effort to come to terms with his past while also fighting to save the future from an unknown threat. Walker Scobell stars with Reynolds as the younger Adam alongside Jennifer Garner and Mark Ruffalo as Adam's parents , Catherine Keener, Zoe Saldaña and Alex Mallari Jr.  The Adam Project  is gearing up to premiere on Netflix in March and those behind the sci-fi adventure are offering some insight to the film.

Related:  The Adam Project News & Updates: Everything We Know

As part of the outlet's virtual Fan Fest, Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy caught up with  IGN   to discuss their new movie  The Adam Project . When asked about the film's time travel rules, the director/producer kept appropriately vague to avoid spoiling the story though explained that they took a generally different approach than other time travel movies. See what Levy explained below:

"I'll start by saying that Ryan and I are not time travel genre wonks, so the goal was to make a time travel movie that felt really grounded and foregrounded character and fun and adventure and heart and didn't get too mired in the rules. To the extent that there are rules that I couldn't eliminate, basically, a person doesn't have their memories reconciled, ie. they don't remember something that has happened to them until they get back to what we, in this movie, call their fixed time.  Grown-up Ryan doesn't remember having gone back until and if and unless he's able to get back to his fixed time, which is the time period that he belongs in. We try to get the rules out of the way so that people can just enjoy the ride and have a visceral experience rather than a cerebral experience. our rule is that if you die out of your fixed time, you just have this molecular smear, what Ryan called 'digital skittles.' So, suddenly, making up a time travel rule, which we're allowed to do, freed us up to do all kinds of action that probably would have been too gory if we were actually doing literal death. So, just the freedom of writing the rules was very, very fun."

The time travel genre has delivered plenty of enjoyable efforts throughout the years, namely that of the  Back to the Future  franchise and Dennis Quaid-starring  Frequency  from which Levy has previously said  The Adam Project  draws inspiration from. However, even the most beloved of films in the genre have frequently been called into question for their time travel rules and either the convoluted nature of their mechanics or the lack of any real structure that causes the story to largely fall apart. Some of the most notable examples of the genre that saw their filmmakers truly take their rules into account are that of  Primer,  Rian Johnson's  Looper  and Christopher Nolan's  Interstellar .

Levy and Reynolds' decision to make their own rules for  The Adam Project  not only allowed them a better sense of creative freedom in their tone and storytelling, but also sounds a way to bridge the more complicated rules of quantum mechanics with the simpler rules of audience-friendly genre fare. Levy's explanation also appears to hint at a more linear structure to how the time travel in the past affects the future, seemingly reminiscent of the Time Heist rules for the Marvel Cinematic Universe's  Avengers: Endgame . Only time will tell how the time travel rules play out when  The Adam Project  premieres on Netflix on March 11.

More:  Netflix: Every Movie & TV Show Releasing In March 2022

Source: IGN

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The 50 All-Time Best Time-Travel Films

The ability to travel through time is by far my favorite movie storyline. Who hasn't, at least once in their lifetime, wished they could turn back the hands of time to buy a winning lottery ticket or to set something right that once went wrong? The movies listed below have a wide range of inventive ways on how the subjects are moved across time. Many of these films use either a mental ability, magical device or a time machine, some seem to have help from a higher power and sometimes the person just wakes up in a different time. If you love TV shows like Outlander, Timeless, Doctor Who or Quantum Leap, then this list of the best time-traveling films is for you.

• Movies or TV
• IMDb Rating
• In Theaters
• Release Year

1. The Time Machine (1960)

G | 103 min | Adventure, Romance, Sci-Fi

A man's vision for a utopian society is disillusioned when travelling forward into time reveals a dark and dangerous society.

Director: George Pal | Stars: Rod Taylor , Alan Young , Yvette Mimieux , Sebastian Cabot

Votes: 44,710

2. Back to the Future (1985)

PG | 116 min | Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi

Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown.

Director: Robert Zemeckis | Stars: Michael J. Fox , Christopher Lloyd , Lea Thompson , Crispin Glover

Votes: 1,302,347 | Gross: $210.61M

Also included are Part II and Part III, all three as one film.

3. The Terminator (1984)

R | 107 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A human soldier is sent from 2029 to 1984 to stop an almost indestructible cyborg killing machine, sent from the same year, which has been programmed to execute a young woman whose unborn son is the key to humanity's future salvation.

Director: James Cameron | Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger , Linda Hamilton , Michael Biehn , Paul Winfield

Votes: 921,435 | Gross: $38.40M

4. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

R | 137 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A cyborg, identical to the one who failed to kill Sarah Connor, must now protect her ten year old son John from an even more advanced and powerful cyborg.

Director: James Cameron | Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger , Linda Hamilton , Edward Furlong , Robert Patrick

Votes: 1,170,550 | Gross: $204.84M

5. Time After Time (1979)

PG | 112 min | Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi

H.G. Wells pursues Jack the Ripper to the 20th Century when the serial murderer uses the future writer's time machine to escape his time period.

Director: Nicholas Meyer | Stars: Malcolm McDowell , Mary Steenburgen , David Warner , Charles Cioffi

Votes: 20,582

6. Donnie Darko (2001)

R | 113 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

After narrowly escaping a bizarre accident, a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a man in a large rabbit suit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.

Director: Richard Kelly | Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal , Jena Malone , Mary McDonnell , Holmes Osborne

Votes: 847,861 | Gross: $1.48M

7. Planet of the Apes (1968)

G | 112 min | Adventure, Sci-Fi

An astronaut crew crash-lands on a planet where highly intelligent non-human ape species are dominant and humans are enslaved.

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner | Stars: Charlton Heston , Roddy McDowall , Kim Hunter , Maurice Evans

Votes: 192,372 | Gross: $33.40M

8. Groundhog Day (1993)

PG | 101 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

A narcissistic, self-centered weatherman finds himself in a time loop on Groundhog Day.

Director: Harold Ramis | Stars: Bill Murray , Andie MacDowell , Chris Elliott , Stephen Tobolowsky

Votes: 683,029 | Gross: $70.91M

Living the same day over and over again for maybe a hundred or more years.

9. Run Lola Run (1998)

R | 80 min | Action, Crime, Thriller

After a botched money delivery, Lola has 20 minutes to come up with 100,000 Deutschmarks.

Director: Tom Tykwer | Stars: Franka Potente , Moritz Bleibtreu , Herbert Knaup , Nina Petri

Votes: 206,624 | Gross: $7.27M

10. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

R | 86 min | Adventure, Comedy, Drama

Three magazine employees head out on an assignment to interview a guy who placed a classified advertisement seeking a companion for time travel.

Director: Colin Trevorrow | Stars: Aubrey Plaza , Mark Duplass , Jake Johnson , Karan Soni

Votes: 130,733 | Gross: $4.01M

11. Doctor Strange (2016)

PG-13 | 115 min | Action, Adventure, Fantasy

While on a journey of physical and spiritual healing, a brilliant neurosurgeon is drawn into the world of the mystic arts.

Director: Scott Derrickson | Stars: Benedict Cumberbatch , Chiwetel Ejiofor , Rachel McAdams , Benedict Wong

Votes: 802,245 | Gross: $232.64M

12. Arrival (II) (2016)

PG-13 | 116 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

A linguist works with the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world.

Director: Denis Villeneuve | Stars: Amy Adams , Jeremy Renner , Forest Whitaker , Michael Stuhlbarg

Votes: 766,626 | Gross: $100.55M

13. Primer (2004)

PG-13 | 77 min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Four friends/fledgling entrepreneurs, knowing that there's something bigger and more innovative than the different error-checking devices they've built, wrestle over their new invention.

Director: Shane Carruth | Stars: Shane Carruth , David Sullivan , Casey Gooden , Anand Upadhyaya

Votes: 113,869 | Gross: $0.42M

14. Interstellar (2014)

PG-13 | 169 min | Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

Director: Christopher Nolan | Stars: Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain , Mackenzie Foy

Votes: 2,087,325 | Gross: $188.02M

There are all kinds of time-travel in Interstellar.

15. 12 Monkeys (1995)

R | 129 min | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

In a future world devastated by disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that wiped out most of the human population on the planet.

Director: Terry Gilliam | Stars: Bruce Willis , Madeleine Stowe , Brad Pitt , Joseph Melito

Votes: 645,486 | Gross: $57.14M

Brad Pitt is so freaky crazy in this film and I love it!

16. La Jetée (1962)

Not Rated | 28 min | Short, Drama, Romance

The story of a man forced to explore his memories in the wake of World War III's devastation, told through still images.

Director: Chris Marker | Stars: Étienne Becker , Jean Négroni , Hélène Chatelain , Davos Hanich

Votes: 36,960

This short film inspired 12 Monkeys.

17. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

TV-PG | 98 min | Animation, Adventure, Comedy

A high-school girl named Makoto acquires the power to travel back in time, and decides to use it for her own personal benefits. Little does she know that she is affecting the lives of others just as much as she is her own.

Director: Mamoru Hosoda | Stars: Riisa Naka , Takuya Ishida , Mitsutaka Itakura , Ayami Kakiuchi

Votes: 70,691

18. Frequency (2000)

PG-13 | 118 min | Crime, Drama, Mystery

An accidental cross-time radio link connects father and son across 30 years. The son tries to save his father's life, but then must fix the consequences.

Director: Gregory Hoblit | Stars: Dennis Quaid , Jim Caviezel , Shawn Doyle , Elizabeth Mitchell

Votes: 115,480 | Gross: $45.01M

No humans travel in time in Frequency but thanks to a ham radio and a phenomenon that opens up a channel, John is able to communicate with his father, 30 years in the past.

19. Timecrimes (2007)

R | 92 min | Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi

A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.

Director: Nacho Vigalondo | Stars: Karra Elejalde , Candela Fernández , Bárbara Goenaga , Nacho Vigalondo

Votes: 68,617 | Gross: $0.04M

20. Deja Vu (2006)

PG-13 | 126 min | Action, Crime, Sci-Fi

After a ferry is bombed in New Orleans, an A.T.F. agent joins a unique investigation using experimental surveillance technology to find the bomber, but soon finds himself becoming obsessed with one of the victims.

Director: Tony Scott | Stars: Denzel Washington , Paula Patton , Jim Caviezel , Val Kilmer

Votes: 326,901 | Gross: $64.04M

The second film on this list with actor Jim Caviezel, who is also in Frequency.

21. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

PG-13 | 132 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

The X-Men send Wolverine to the past in a desperate effort to change history and prevent an event that results in doom for both humans and mutants.

Director: Bryan Singer | Stars: Patrick Stewart , Ian McKellen , Hugh Jackman , James McAvoy

Votes: 743,685 | Gross: $233.92M

22. Pleasantville (1998)

PG-13 | 124 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

Two 1990s teenage siblings find themselves transported to a 1950s sitcom where their influence begins to profoundly change that colorless, complacent world.

Director: Gary Ross | Stars: Tobey Maguire , Jeff Daniels , Joan Allen , William H. Macy

Votes: 136,074 | Gross: $40.57M

23. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

PG-13 | 113 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A soldier fighting aliens gets to relive the same day over and over again, the day restarting every time he dies.

Director: Doug Liman | Stars: Tom Cruise , Emily Blunt , Bill Paxton , Brendan Gleeson

Votes: 733,988 | Gross: $100.21M

Live. Die. Repeat.

24. The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)

PG | 102 min | Adventure, Drama, Romance

A United States Navy destroyer escort participates in a Navy "invisibility" experiment that inadvertently sends two sailors forty years into the future.

Director: Stewart Raffill | Stars: Michael Paré , Nancy Allen , Eric Christmas , Bobby Di Cicco

Votes: 16,702 | Gross: $8.10M

25. About Time (I) (2013)

R | 123 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

At the age of 21, Tim discovers he can travel in time and change what happens and has happened in his own life. His decision to make his world a better place by getting a girlfriend turns out not to be as easy as you might think.

Director: Richard Curtis | Stars: Domhnall Gleeson , Rachel McAdams , Bill Nighy , Lydia Wilson

Votes: 384,513 | Gross: $15.32M

26. The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)

PG-13 | 107 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

Henry DeTamble, a librarian, possesses a unique gene that lets him involuntarily travel through time. His wife, Claire Abshire, finds it difficult to cope with it.

Director: Robert Schwentke | Stars: Eric Bana , Rachel McAdams , Ron Livingston , Michelle Nolden

Votes: 157,667 | Gross: $63.41M

Rachel McAdams must love time-travel because she has been in 4 of them but she is never a time traveler in any of them. She was also in Doctor Strange and Midnight in Paris.

27. Somewhere in Time (1980)

PG | 103 min | Drama, Fantasy, Romance

A Chicago playwright uses self-hypnosis to travel back in time and meet the actress whose vintage portrait hangs in a grand hotel.

Director: Jeannot Szwarc | Stars: Christopher Reeve , Jane Seymour , Christopher Plummer , Teresa Wright

Votes: 32,403 | Gross: $9.71M

The most romantic film on the list.

28. Happy Accidents (2000)

R | 110 min | Comedy, Romance

New Yorker Ruby Weaver believes she has found the man of her dreams in Sam Deed, who is her best catch in some time--except that he assures her that he came from the future.

Director: Brad Anderson | Stars: Marisa Tomei , Vincent D'Onofrio , Holland Taylor , Mick Weber

Votes: 10,215 | Gross: $0.69M

An underrated film.

29. Time Bandits (1981)

PG | 110 min | Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy

A young boy accidentally joins a band of time travelling dwarves, as they jump from era to era looking for treasure to steal.

Director: Terry Gilliam | Stars: Sean Connery , Shelley Duvall , John Cleese , Katherine Helmond

Votes: 68,138 | Gross: $42.37M

30. Lucy (I) (2014)

R | 89 min | Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller

A woman, accidentally caught in a dark deal, turns the tables on her captors and transforms into a merciless warrior evolved beyond human logic.

Director: Luc Besson | Stars: Scarlett Johansson , Morgan Freeman , Choi Min-sik , Amr Waked

Votes: 532,847 | Gross: $126.66M

31. Sleeper (1973)

PG | 89 min | Comedy, Sci-Fi

A nerdish store owner is revived out of cryostasis into a future world to fight an oppressive government.

Director: Woody Allen | Stars: Woody Allen , Diane Keaton , John Beck , Mary Gregory

Votes: 44,758 | Gross: $2.91M

32. Midnight in Paris (2011)

PG-13 | 94 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.

Director: Woody Allen | Stars: Owen Wilson , Rachel McAdams , Kathy Bates , Kurt Fuller

Votes: 449,007 | Gross: $56.82M

33. Looper (2012)

R | 119 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi

In 2074, when the mob wants to get rid of someone, the target is sent into the past, where a hired gun awaits - someone like Joe - who one day learns the mob wants to 'close the loop' by sending back Joe's future self for assassination.

Director: Rian Johnson | Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt , Bruce Willis , Emily Blunt , Paul Dano

Votes: 601,860 | Gross: $66.49M

34. Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

R | 99 min | Comedy, Sci-Fi

A malfunctioning time machine at a ski resort takes a man back to 1986 with his two friends and nephew, where they must relive a fateful night and not change anything to make sure the nephew is born.

Director: Steve Pink | Stars: John Cusack , Rob Corddry , Craig Robinson , Clark Duke

Votes: 186,042 | Gross: $50.29M

35. 13 Going on 30 (2004)

PG-13 | 98 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

Unpopular schoolgirl Jenna Rink makes an unusual wish on her birthday. Miraculously, her wish comes true and the 13-year-old Jenna wakes up the next day as a 30-year-old woman.

Director: Gary Winick | Stars: Jennifer Garner , Mark Ruffalo , Judy Greer , Andy Serkis

Votes: 215,824 | Gross: $57.23M

13 Going on 30 is a fun and funny film.

36. The Time Machine (2002)

PG-13 | 96 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Hoping to alter the events of the past, a 19th century inventor instead travels 800,000 years into the future, where he finds humankind divided into two warring races.

Director: Simon Wells | Stars: Guy Pearce , Yancey Arias , Mark Addy , Phyllida Law

Votes: 130,172 | Gross: $56.68M

A really good remake of the original 1960 film and the coolest time-machine in any movie.

37. Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

PG-13 | 103 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

Peggy Sue faints at a high school reunion. When she wakes up, she finds herself in her own past, just before she finished school.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola | Stars: Kathleen Turner , Nicolas Cage , Barry Miller , Catherine Hicks

Votes: 40,674 | Gross: $41.38M

38. Next (2007)

PG-13 | 96 min | Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller

A Las Vegas magician who can see into the future is pursued by FBI agents seeking to use his abilities to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack.

Director: Lee Tamahori | Stars: Nicolas Cage , Julianne Moore , Jessica Biel , Thomas Kretschmann

Votes: 166,048 | Gross: $18.21M

Nicolas Cage was also in Peggy Sue Got Married.

39. Predestination (I) (2014)

R | 97 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi

As his last assignment, a temporal agent is tasked to travel back in time and prevent a bomb attack in New York in 1975. The hunt, however, turns out to be beyond the bounds of possibility.

Directors: Michael Spierig , Peter Spierig | Stars: Ethan Hawke , Sarah Snook , Noah Taylor , Madeleine West

Votes: 303,825 | Gross: $0.07M

This movie is trippy, no pun intended. Just when you think you have figured out the twist, the ending blows your mind.

40. The Lake House (2006)

PG | 99 min | Drama, Fantasy, Romance

A lonely doctor who once occupied an unusual lakeside house begins to exchange love letters with its former resident, a frustrated architect. They must try to unravel the mystery behind their extraordinary romance before it's too late.

Director: Alejandro Agresti | Stars: Keanu Reeves , Sandra Bullock , Christopher Plummer , Ebon Moss-Bachrach

Votes: 157,404 | Gross: $52.33M

Keanu has been in 3 time-travel movies.

41. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

PG | 90 min | Adventure, Comedy, Music

Two rock-'n-rolling teens, on the verge of failing their class, set out on a quest to make the ultimate school history report after being presented with a time machine.

Director: Stephen Herek | Stars: Keanu Reeves , Alex Winter , George Carlin , Terry Camilleri

Votes: 141,331 | Gross: $40.49M

42. Source Code (2011)

PG-13 | 93 min | Action, Drama, Mystery

A soldier wakes up in someone else's body and discovers he's part of an experimental government program to find the bomber of a commuter train within 8 minutes.

Director: Duncan Jones | Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal , Michelle Monaghan , Vera Farmiga , Jeffrey Wright

Votes: 548,460 | Gross: $54.71M

Jake Gyllenhaal has been in three time-travel films, including Prince of Persia (not listed).

43. The Jacket (2005)

R | 103 min | Drama, Fantasy, Mystery

A Gulf war veteran is wrongly sent to a mental institution for insane criminals, where he becomes the object of a doctor's experiments, and his life is completely affected by them.

Director: John Maybury | Stars: Adrien Brody , Keira Knightley , Daniel Craig , Kris Kristofferson

Votes: 119,104 | Gross: $6.30M

44. The Final Countdown (1980)

PG | 103 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A modern aircraft carrier is thrown back in time to 1941 near Hawaii, just hours before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Director: Don Taylor | Stars: Kirk Douglas , Martin Sheen , Katharine Ross , James Farentino

Votes: 26,808 | Gross: $16.65M

45. Frankenstein Unbound (1990)

R | 85 min | Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi

The ultimate weapon which was meant to be safe for the mankind produces global side effects including time slides and disappearances.The scientist behind the project and his car are zapped from the year 2031 to 1817's Switzerland.

Director: Roger Corman | Stars: John Hurt , Raul Julia , Nick Brimble , Bridget Fonda

Votes: 4,109 | Gross: $0.33M

46. Freejack (1992)

R | 110 min | Action, Crime, Sci-Fi

Bounty hunters from the future transport a doomed race car driver to New York City in 2009, where his mind will be replaced with that of a dead billionaire.

Director: Geoff Murphy | Stars: Emilio Estevez , Mick Jagger , Rene Russo , Anthony Hopkins

Votes: 17,412 | Gross: $17.13M

47. The Butterfly Effect (2004)

R | 113 min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Evan Treborn suffers blackouts during significant events of his life. As he grows up, he finds a way to remember these lost memories and a supernatural way to alter his life by reading his journal.

Directors: Eric Bress , J. Mackye Gruber | Stars: Ashton Kutcher , Amy Smart , Melora Walters , Elden Henson

Votes: 519,900 | Gross: $57.94M

Changing one thing in the past can cause chaos in the future.

48. Idiocracy (2006)

R | 84 min | Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi

Corporal Joe Bauers, a decisively average American, is selected as a guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. He is forgotten and left to awaken to a future so incredibly moronic that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.

Director: Mike Judge | Stars: Luke Wilson , Maya Rudolph , Dax Shepard , Terry Crews

Votes: 181,201 | Gross: $0.44M

49. Army of Darkness (1992)

R | 81 min | Comedy, Horror

When Ash Williams is accidentally transported to 1300 A.D., he must retrieve the Necronomicon and battle an army of the dead in order to return home.

Director: Sam Raimi | Stars: Bruce Campbell , Embeth Davidtz , Marcus Gilbert , Ian Abercrombie

Votes: 193,888 | Gross: $11.50M

50. Timecop (1994)

R | 99 min | Action, Crime, Sci-Fi

Max Walker, an officer for a security agency that regulates time travel, must fend for his life against a shady politician who's intent on changing the past to control the future.

Director: Peter Hyams | Stars: Jean-Claude Van Damme , Mia Sara , Ron Silver , Bruce McGill

Votes: 64,005 | Gross: $44.85M

Timecop 2 is not very good.

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