🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, 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 become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. 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 underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility