🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter'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 hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *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, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced 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*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility