🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's examine at some 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'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire 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 future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine 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 pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance