🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture 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 ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance