🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to 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 discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded 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 optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material 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*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set 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 timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance