🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility