🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce 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 spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *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 chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business 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 growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, 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 advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility