🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, 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 worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis 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 quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio 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 in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility