🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before 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 (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility