🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 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 aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *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 nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility