Did Soylent Green Take Place on August 24, 2022?

Much like , fans of the dystopian sci-fi movie Soylent Green were previously counting down the days until the year 2022, the point in time when the Charlton Heston-starring movie took place. In recent days however there’s been some confusion as to the exact point in time that the 1973 feature takes place, with posters going viral online that specifically call out August 24, 2022 as being the exact date of the movie. So did Soylent Green actually take place this week? The short answer is that we don’t know, but the specific dates on these posters remains misleading.

Several viral posts have made the rounds on social media featuring the poster for Soylent Green with a tagline that reads: “People need it…It’s the year 2022. August 24, 2022.” While the first two parts of that tagline are accurate to the actual film’s marketing, the addition of the specific date is an addition clearly made with photoshop. Whoever created the alternate version of the poster re-created the entire tagline to fully sell their little misdirection. You can see a comparison between the original poster and the edit below, notice how clear the text is on the right along with how it uses a different font.

So if Soylent Green doesn’t take place on August 24, 2022, when does it take place? We don’t really know, the film offers no specific dates or times about its setting, all it confirms at the start is that it’s set in 2022. Based on the attire that the characters wear, and a remark from Heston’s Robert Thorn that it’s 90 degrees outside at night time, we can assume it’s set in a summer month, making it being set this week likely but not official.

What should actually concern fans of the classic movie is that that it may or may not have taken place on a day that we have already lived, but in the other similarities that its grim version of the future has to our current reality. In the context of the film, Soylent Green is a food substitute allegedly made from Plankton that is used to feed the world. The Earth is not only overly populated to the point of a food crisis though but several other ecological disasters. 

Central to the movie’s plot however is that the oceans are dying, with our actual oceans facing mass extinction events due to pollution rates. As a result of the dying oceans however it forces the Soylent company to begin recycling the dead and the incarcerated to create their product. Soylent Green is people after all.