🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind'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.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility