🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But 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*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility