🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding 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 these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance