🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to 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 discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility