🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, 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 certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance