The Simpsons predictions: which are real and which are edited

What the prophecy says

The claim is not one prophecy. It is a format. A grid of four or six screenshots is posted, captioned with a year in the 1990s, and the frames appear to show something that only happened decades later: a president, a pandemic, a corporate takeover, a physics discovery. The implied conclusion is that the writers somehow knew.

Because it is a pile of separate claims, it can only be checked one at a time. Some of the scenes really aired, exactly as described. Some of the pictures were made on a computer years afterwards and never appeared on television. Sorting the two is the whole job, and that is what a Simpsons predictions list should mean.

Where it first appeared

These are the episodes behind the best-known items, with the years they were broadcast.

“Marge in Chains” (season 4, episode 21, May 1993): Springfield is hit by an epidemic called the Osaka Flu.

“Lisa on Ice” (1994): a handheld device turns the note “Beat up Martin” into “Eat up Martha.”

“Lisa's Wedding” (1995): Lisa talks to Marge by video call, and wrist-worn phones appear.

“Lisa's Sax” (1997): a children's book titled Curious George and the Ebola Virus.

“The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace” (1998): Homer stands at a blackboard covered in equations.

“When You Dish Upon a Star” (season 10, episode 5, 1998): a sign reads “20th Century Fox, A Division of Walt Disney Co.”

“Bart to the Future” (season 11, episode 17, 2000): a grown-up Lisa is president and inherits “quite a budget crunch from President Trump.”

“Elementary School Musical” (2010): a school betting pool on the Nobel prize includes the economist Bengt Holmström.

Those frames are real. Anyone can watch them.

How the date spread

What travels online is usually not the episode. It is a screenshot, and screenshots are easy to edit.

The coronavirus example is the clearest. Three panels of the famous graphic genuinely come from “Marge in Chains.” The fourth, a news ticker reading “CORONA VIRUS,” was altered in January 2020 and did not air in the original episode. The 1993 storyline is about a flu, and it was written as a joke.

The same method turned up in July 2024, when pictures said to show Donald Trump in a coffin were shared after the attempt on his life. The show's executive producer Matt Selman answered plainly: “The image of Donald Trump in a coffin never appeared on The Simpsons. It is doctored.” Newsweek reported that versions of the fake had been circulating since 2017.

Not every viral image is fabricated, which is why the genre survives. The side-by-side of Lisa Simpson in a purple jacket and pearls next to Kamala Harris in a similar outfit uses a real frame from the 2000 episode. A Simpsons writer and producer, Al Jean, posted the comparison himself, calling it a “‘prediction' I'm proud to be a part of.”

What happened on the day

Taken one at a time, the record looks like this.

Disney and Fox. The sign gag aired in 1998. Disney's acquisition of 21st Century Fox became effective at 12:02 a.m. Eastern Time on 20 March 2019, in a transaction valued at about $71 billion. The joke therefore preceded the event by twenty-one years, named no date, and was the sort of guess about studio consolidation that an entertainment writer can make cheaply and often.

The Trump presidency. “Bart to the Future” aired in 2000 and has Lisa inheriting a budget problem from a President Trump. It names no election and no year. The writer Dan Greaney has said he wrote it as “a warning to America,” which is the opposite of a forecast: the premise worked because it sounded absurd at the time.

The Higgs boson. Homer's 1998 blackboard does carry an equation that, worked through, lands near the particle's mass. Simon Singh, author of a book on the show's mathematics, said: “If you work it out, you get the mass of a Higgs boson that's only a bit larger than the nano-mass of a Higgs boson actually is,” and noted that “Homer makes this prediction 14 years before it was discovered.” This one is genuine, and the explanation is mundane: several of the show's writers are trained mathematicians, and the blackboard is their in-joke.

The pandemic. A 1993 cartoon flu is not a 2020 coronavirus, and the picture that joins them was edited.

Kamala Harris. The outfit really does match and the frame is genuine, but the character wearing it is the fictional President Lisa Simpson, and the photograph beside it comes from a vice-presidential swearing-in in January 2021.

The 2024 coffin images. Fabricated, and disowned by the programme's own showrunner.

Verdict

Real or Legend files this as debunked, with a distinction worth keeping. The episodes listed above are real and easy to check, and nothing here says the show did not air them.

What is debunked is the conclusion drawn from them. A long-running comedy writes thousands of throwaway jokes about politics, business, technology and disease. Across the years covered above, 1993 to 2010, a handful of them land near something that later happens, and those are the ones that get screenshotted. The thousands that landed nowhere are never posted. That is a property of volume, not of foresight, and it is the answer to whether Simpsons predictions came true.

The items that look genuinely uncanny — an exact virus name, a dated disaster, the death of a named person — are, on inspection, the ones typed into an image editor afterwards. When a Simpsons prediction looks too perfect, that is usually the tell.