🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, 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 gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes 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 better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility