🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, 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. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely 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 directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *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, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous 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 automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, 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 more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance