🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's 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 examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

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. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin 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 humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility