🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, 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 ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (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 aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set 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 seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility