🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place 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 any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel 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, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance