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Let's face it this is a prequel to almost everything!
Because so many franchises use a crapsack earth, an undefined form of interstellar drive and stasis...well there you go!
  • Elysium, would be after Wooderson got sucked in the blackhole and and Murph broke the formula allowing them to build massive halos and O'Neill cylinders but BEFORE he got back.
    • Wooderson sucked into black hole. Murph cracks the formula and mankind makes space stations hailing Murph as a hero. Wooderson pops out of the black hole. Old Murph goes into stasis to go meet him and die, never coming back. With Murph out of the way Evil Jodie Foster, a descendant of Ellie Arroway from Contact, takes over. And then a descendant or relative of Dr. Mann fights against Elysium.
    • WHOA this makes Contact the prequel, or first chapter, to an intergerational epic about mankind's first steps into space.
  • Yes. Aliens send the contact signal so we make the machine which uses a WHAT...no, a WORMHOLE, an artificially created wormhole to zing a ship across space. However the government DENIES the existence of this officially declaring it a hoax (sound like a familiar theme?). So in the future of the future some scientists dusts off an old earth legend about contact with aliens by some machine. Investigating it that person cracks the code for making artificial wormholes and VOILA!

It is the prequel to Event Horizon
How do you think humanity learned to harness black holes for interstellar flight?
  • Event Horizon just introduces the dark side of the 5-dimentional-beings.

In the original script, the wormhole led to the Court of Azathoth.

I read a story on the internet that Cooper was supposed to be sent to Azathoth's domain instead of the Tesseract, but that the audience at the test screenings reacted strangely to the footage and that Nolan decided to change the script because of it.

The movie is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica (2003)
There are 12 potential worlds. Eventually humanity develops terraforming technology and returns to the other potentially habitable planets and colonizes them. Then, at a point, Robot War happens and culminates in robots leaving to create their own 13th colony, naming it after humanity's original homeworld. The Earth that humanity discovers in the series finale is their original homeworld, which has now recovered, and people that were left on it gradually, after many generations, have lost all technology and civilization and became tribal. And beings who created the wormhole and helped Cooper contact his daughter are the angels (or whatever they are), who appeared to Baltar and Six in the series.

2001 and Interstellar are connected
So, when Bowman enters into the monolith and gets to the "hotel" room, he sees himself as a young man, an old man, a dying man, and so forth over and over again, all at different "times" and "places," and is finally reborn as a Starchild. If dimensions are, more less, moving along a "number line," like walking down your street is moving along the X axis number line, jumping is moving along the Y axis, and taking a step left is along the Z axis, Bowman is experiencing non-linear time (he's moving back and forth), and seeing different possibilities of time (moving left and right of time). Thus, the Starchild is born as a fifth dimensional being, who doesn't experience linear time, and sees all permutations on all scales. Bowman is the fifth dimensional being that kicks off the movie.

The future alien/human things are Time Lords that evolved from the humans.
Albeit proto-Time Lords who don't have complete control over their manipulation of time and space.

The wormhole is a metafictional passageway that leads to another movie of a different genre.
The movie starts out as hard science fiction, so space travel is depicted in a somewhat realistic manner: the Ranger needs a launch vehicle and the transit to Saturn takes two years. After going through the wormhole, the characters are effectively in a softer work, where the Ranger can land and take off on its own power and leap from planet to planet in a short time, and where you can plunge into a black hole and live.

Something akin to the Universal Century happened to mankind.
Towards the end, following Cooper's final, several decades-long Time Skip, there's a large orbiting space colony orbiting Saturn named Cooper Station, that vaguely resembles an O'Neill Cylinder colony à la the UC Gundam continuity, with several more mentioned as being en route. This could be explained as the deteriorating conditions on Earth prompting humanity to find a feasible way to both move and live off-world through vast artificial ships, leaving behind those whose souls remained weighed down by gravity. Except unlike the UC timeline, there wasn't enough time or drive for an Earth Federation analogue to form especially since Cooper Station is all but explicitly an American colony.

The Arks are built using abandoned cities as raw materials.
No need to dig for it. Everything they need is already there. After billions die due to famines there's an abundance of steel, silicon, plastics, and whatever else they need.

The film is a prequel to Firefly.
The stations and the new planet together comprised a jumping-off point for humanity to leave the solar system. Upon further exploration, they found a new system with "dozens of planets and hundreds of moons". Shortly after they arrived, the wormhole closed. It would explain why nobody's ever gone back to check out "Earth That Was".

The film is a sequel to Transcendence.
...At least in spirit. After Will Castor's second murder, there are only small pockets of technology left - Boston has phone service, for instance. But in general, "There are no smartphones, let alone ones with personalities to fall in love with. There aren't even many computers, save for a laptop used by Matthew McConaughey's more tech-friendly character. Look at the emptiness of an administrator's desk when he has a meeting at his kids' school. In the same scene, a teacher spouts an exposition-laden belief that people of the 20th century were wasteful and excessive and spent too much money on "useless machines." Given the dialogue and the apparent dependency on textbooks with a rewritten history of the (faked) Apollo program, we can assume there is no longer any Wikipedia, or any internet whatsoever. Outside of the secret NASA facility, it's a fairly analog world, one in which almost everybody is a farmer."

The film is a sequel to Evolution (2001).
The bacteria responsible for the blight are said to be nitrogen-based, similar to the aliens in Evolution. Also, their final form was a giant germ. Rather than being destroyed, the alien amoeba simply split into multiple amoebae and evolved into a plant disease.

The Power of Love is just Cooper's imperfect theory.
We've no real indication other than his saying so that "love" is a physical force. He's dealing with an impossibly advanced civilization whose technology looks like magic to us, and Cooper is simply coming up with an explanation that makes sense to him. If it comes across like magical woo, that's because it looks that way to Cooper, not because it works that way in reality. Given how much the movie references other Arthur C. Clarke work, it seemed fairly obvious to me that his Third Law is involved here. The answer to how the tesseract's time-fiddling works is simply supposed to be "beyond our understanding, but human connections are necessary to pass on the information." Love "transcends time" in that Cooper's connection to his daughter enables her to understand the information he gave her, something he'd initially dismissed with Brand, and that's what Cooper latches onto in order to understand the incomprehensible. The actual physical laws of how it all works, on the other hand, involves math and technology that none of us could yet begin to understand.
  • As is his idea that the 5D beings are humans from the future. He has no way of knowing this, nor is there a particular train of thought that leads him to it. The architects of the wormhole may well be benevolent, impossibly advanced aliens after all, as only Cooper's word says otherwise.

Dr. Brand will greet Cooper with an armload of babies.
So she's marooned on a habitable planet with CASE and freezers full of egg cells. She has no way of knowing whether Cooper and TARS successfully sent the gravity data back to Earth or not. If they failed, Dr. Brand should start implementing Plan B as soon as possible. If they succeeded, well, there's plenty of planet for everybody when the colonists show up, right?

Interstellar takes place in the Mario universe, specifically Super Mario Galaxy 2
Before the blight, Mario was a plumber residing on Earth. He found a dimensional rift not unlike the wormhole near Saturn that lead to the Mushroom Kingdom, a planet in a distant galaxy. Where this gets interesting is when it deals with Rosalina. Rosalina happens to be one of the humans who transcended the third dimension and built the Tesseract. Rosalina sent Mario to the Mushroom Kingdom to protect their world from Bowser, similar to how they used Cooper to save the human race in a convoluted way.
Perhaps the Mario world is one of the worlds the 5-dimensional humans colonized after their transcendence. This also explains the presence of warp pipes and the many violations of physics in the Mario series; Rosalina and the 5-dimensional humans are controlling the laws of physics to allow Mario to win against Bowser. This gets even more interesting when thematic elements are involved. Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Interstellar share a common theme, being reunited with your loved ones. Rosalina and Luma were reunited along with Mario and Peach in Super Mario Galaxy 2. Love is also stated to be a "gentle pull" in Super Mario Galaxy 2, similar to remarks about love as a force in Interstellar.

The events of Inception are a dream happening after the events of Interstellar
The characters of Inception are in hyper-sleep, travelling from their native satellite station to start new lives in the colony on the other side of the wormhole. The reason Ariadne and Cobb picture a city folding in half is because they're half-remembering the structure of their own home...

The disease is the result of biological warfare
Pretty self-explanatory, really- a big war (possibly World War III) happened in the past and killed a lot of people, and the blight was developed by some nation or other as a biological weapon. Things went horribly right, billions of people died (from both starvation and from further fighting over the remaining resources), leaving only a small percentage of the original population alive, and in the aftermath some kind of treaty was signed that abolished every nations' armies.

This film is set in an alternate universe of WALL•E
Both films are set in Crapsack World where Earth is filled with dust (Blight and Trash overload, respectively) and has a large-scale interstellar journey. These films also has advanced robots.At one point, Donald mentioned that at his time, people come up with new things and 'everyday is like Christmas'. Said events could be the doing of Buy n'Large. But when the blight (Interstellar's version of Earth dusting) started to happen, people stopped consuming their products and they went bankrupt.

When TARS spoke to Cooper inside the black hole, it was actually the fifth dimension beings using his voice.
We never see him, and we hear his voice very suddenly, after it was established he and Cooper had lost contact. He never describes what he can see or where he is, and seems to understand what's going on far more than Cooper does, also appearing to gently prod Cooper towards the right course of action. The way he talks to Cooper in this scene is very different from before - there's no joking around or taunting, and their conversation is more akin to a teacher gently leading a student to the right answer than anything else.

Interstellar is a prequel to Star Wars that doesn't suck.
We've seen that the black hole/wormhole alter position in time, and they certainty send you to a galaxy far, far away. The humans finally resettled on a new planet in their new Galaxy, perhaps called Correlia or Alderaan. Eons down the line, they develop FTL travel and discover the kyber crystals, as well as other intelligent life.

This also explains what the "power of love" that Coop and Brand talk about really is— it's the Force!

The Martian is a prequel to Interstellar.
  • With Strong Family Resemblance in full play here. The Earth is beginning to suffer the blight that affects all crops on the planet, so NASA begins Project Ares to colonize Mars. Of course, that plan ended with Ares 3's Mark Watney incident, and all the cost that had gone in the effort to rescue Watney from Mars forced NASA to shut down, or rather, went underground per the President's orders. Watney himself went on to build a family that will eventually lead to the birth of his Identical Grandson Dr. Mann, while Commander Lewis's generations will lead to the birth of Cooper, who himself fathers his Generation Xerox daughter Murph. All of this, including the events happening in The Martian, are in fact engineered by the Fifth Dimensional beings in order to send Cooper into the black hole and ensures humanity's survival.
    • This fits fairly well, assuming the events between Interstellar and The Martian were spread out far enough. The rotational gravity and ion engines from Hermes would have been perfected in Endurance, and cryonic sleeping pods would have been invented as a result (thus giving astronauts more options when supplies ran low). According to somewhere, the Landers used in the Endurance mission were also built under the guise of being supply vehicles for future missions to Mars. If they were commissioned after the Ares 3 mission, it would make a lot of sense, since having a supply vehicle with that level of speed and maneuverability would have been very useful if a repeat of the Ares 3 mission occurred.
    • If Strong Family Resemblance is in play, this also makes both films sequels to Contact. Ellie and Palmer would have had a child after the events of that film, naturally played by Jessica Chastain in The Martian (her marrying would explain the last name Lewis), and both her and Watney being ancestors of Cooper and Mann, respectively. Benevolent Precursors and wormholes that can be traversed by humans have already been established in such a universe, but after the initial trip, the Precursors shut down their end of the wormhole generator, making humans unable to use it directly, though the technology does give them new scientific insights that allow them to launch several Mars missions by 2035 and providing insight that would later be used to build the Endurance. For a bit of Fridge Horror, Mars may also be the origin point of The Blight, having been inadvertently brought back by the Ares missions.
    • Commander Lewis was born in July of 1995 and if she is Ellie and Palmer's daughter, that would set the events of Contact at least in 1994 which might contradict the unofficial notion that Contact would be set in the year of it's release: 1997. Interstellar takes place "sometime in the mid-21st century", putting it anywhere within the 2040s to the 2060s. Unless Lewis already has a full grown kid who had a kid of their own (making Lewis a grandmother at 40), it wouldn't be as plausible for her to be Cooper's ancestor. It could've worked if say Cooper was Lewis' child and born long before the events of The Martian which would put him right at the age he was in Interstellar. That, however, is unlikely solely because of the different last names. Then again, he could also be, let's say, "extended family" or Cooper is Lewis' child, but she gave him up for adoption to a family with the last name Cooper.

Interstellar is an alternate reality from the Stargate multiverse
  • Albeit one in which Goa'uld System Lord Ra never found Earth. Thus, Ra never brought humans to other worlds, Ra's Stargate was never brought to Earth, and the Stargate program was never launched. The race that created the wormhole is a benevolent Ascended race sympathetic to Humanity's plight.

Seeing Murph in the Hospital wasn't the last time that Cooper would see his daughter
Think about it, you've got wormholes and the ability to send information back in time. What if Murph was (relatively) quick to have her father leave because though it would be the last time she'd see him, it was far from the last time he'd see her? There's a lot of time between Murph's cracking the gravity equation to Cooper's recovery. Perhaps Cooper was able to travel through time and space and reconnect with his children and their children. If so, Murph knew that he had to go back through the wormhole to Brand.

Some of the other Lazarus astronauts are rescued
Assuming that any of them landed on a planet with distorted time like Miller's, then even if they didn't send a message reporting adequate conditions, if they held on long enough, they might have still survived long enough to be discovered once humanity did make it through the wormhole.

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