🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch 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 underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle 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 spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located 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. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out 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 wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility