🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent 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 good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *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* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out 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 love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility