🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated 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 can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age 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 at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest 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 these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance