🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of 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 underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks 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, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance