🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have 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 remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment 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 adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen 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 setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual 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 spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance