According to viral social media posts, "The Simpsons" predicted a kiss cam moment at a Coldplay concert in July 2025. After a video went viral allegedly showing the Astronomer CEO caught cheating with the company's chief people officer, users on social media quickly claimed this was another event the sitcom had predicted long before it happened.
The rumor spread across various social media platforms like TikTok, X (archived), Instagram (archived) and Facebook (archived), in various languages. Some posts garnered millions of views, and some even contained specific details (archived), such as the season, episode and air date, where the supposed screenshot was allegedly taken from. DW Fact Check had a look into the alleged prediction.
Claim: "Did the Simpsons really predict the Coldplay Concert incident in a 2003 episode?? (The alleged affair or sighting of Astronomer CEO Andy Byron & Kristin Cabot)," says this post on X that includes a still of the kiss cam footage alongside an image that appears to show the similar scene from the "The Simpsons" cartoon.
DW Fact Check: False
Most versions of the rumor claim the prediction occurred in Season 26, Episode 10, "The Man Who Came to Be Dinner." The episode aired on January 4, 2015, and features a plot in which the Simpson family is abducted by aliens while visiting an amusement park. The episode is available on streaming platforms and YouTube here. However, there is no such scene in this episode.
Another episode, Season 17, Episode 22, "Marge and Homer Turn a Couple Play," does include a kiss cam scene, but it takes place at a baseball match, and the characters kissing are Marge and Homer. This scene can be viewed here.
The alleged prediction screenshot circulating online is, therefore, most likely generated by artificial intelligence or digitally manipulated. DW Fact Check uploaded the image to several AI-detection platforms, including AIorNot, which labeled it as "likely AI-generated." Hive Moderation even gave an estimate of 99.9% "likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content."
But this isn't the first time "The Simpsons" has allegedly predicted future events. You may have seen some of these viral claims before:
Donald Trump as US president
One of the most famous alleged predictions from "The Simpsons" was that Donald Trump would become the president of the United States.
In Season 11, Episode 17, Lisa Simpson did actually reference Donald Trump's presidency in an episode that originally aired on March 19, 2000. In the episode, set in the future, Lisa is the current US president and implies that real estate mogul Trump had been her predecessor and caused a budget crisis. In 2015, the media cited the episode as a foreshadowing of Trump's future presidential run.
However, the image often used to illustrate this "presidential prediction" is actually from a short episode called "Trumptastic Voyage," from Season 25, which aired in July 2015, after Trump had already announced his candidacy. The image shows Trump and Homer on an escalator in front of a crowd. The cartoon scene is based on a real-life event from June of the same year.
2024 Baltimore bridge collapse
Another viral post claimed that "The Simpsons" predicted the March 2024 collapse of the Baltimore bridge, showing Homer and Lisa watching the event unfold. At first glance, the image looks real, but the devil is in the details. There are small hints that this image is actually AI-generated.
If you take a closer look at the image, you'll see that Lisa's hair has 10 spikes, whereas the real character of the cartoon series only has eight. Homer's hair is also incorrect — the zigzags are noticeably narrower than in the show.
COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
Many people have also claimed online that the show predicted the COVID-19 pandemic. They refer to Season 4, Episode 21, titled "Marge in Chains." In the episode many Springfield residents order juicers from Osaka, Japan. One of the factory workers is sick and coughs into the boxes, spreading what becomes known as the "Osaka Flu."
The only similarity between the "Osaka Flu" and COVID-19 is that both originated in East Asia. The fictional flu did not lead to a global lockdown, a pandemic or millions of deaths. By contrast, COVID-19 was far more serious, resulting in over 7 million deaths worldwide, as recorded by the World Health Organization.
Predictions not intentional
While many so-called "Simpsons predictions" circulating online are either misattributed or fabricated, there are indeed several instances where the show did get it right or came close to reality. So what have the creative talent behind the show said about this phenomenon? "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening has explained that the writers of the show try to imagine the most outrageous possible outcomes for their storylines.
"We've done so many jokes over the many seasons that we've been on the air that eventually we're going to get something right," he said about this phenomenon at a fan event in August 2024. "We always write jokes on the things that are supposed to be the most absurd possibility and it turns out that that's the way the world is these days. So everything seems to come true." He added, however, that the predictions are not intentional.
