You can often see a director’s future in their early work. Early Wes Anderson immediately established his style, Peter Jackson’s fantasy interludes in Heavenly Creatures could be pulled directly from Lord of the Rings, and you can even see echoes of Superman in James Gunn’s screenplay for Scooby-Doo. But some movies are more influential than others, and in 2011 we got a sci-fi dystopian thriller that predicted some of the greatest stars of the age — and the story we would see again and again.
Real Steel came out in 2011, but you wouldn’t know that from watching it. The gritty worldbuilding of backlot, state-fair-style robot boxing was originally based on a 1956 story by Richard Matheson, but this movie takes a much different approach than the previous adaptation in an episode of The Twilight Zone.
