🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity 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 – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set 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 feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: 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 facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, 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’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves 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 pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance