🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, 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 mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached 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 remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial 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 original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung 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. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to argue with 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. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration 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 gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned 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 chance