10 Movies That Get Basic Facts Wrong

6. The Mayans Predicted The World Would End In 2012 - 2012

Roland Emmerich's absurd disaster movie 2012 revolves around a series of apocalyptic disasters which threaten life on Earth, and is heavily inspired by the much-cited "prediction" from the Mayans that all life on Earth would end on December 21, 2012.

The film itself literally has a character explain to the audience, "The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago," despite the fact that this is a massively adventurous interpretation of the Mayan calendar.

Any Mayan academic will tell you that the apocalypse theory is a bunch of scaremongering hooey, as this date was simply when the civilisation's long-count calendar ended.

But just as a calendar hanging on your wall doesn't suggest that December 31 is the end of everything, neither was the conclusion of the long-count calendar an ominous foretelling of a world-ending event to come.

Better still, discovered Mayan monuments have only mentioned the date "2012" once and also included dates 7,000 years into the future, suggesting that they didn't see the end times coming for a good while yet.