🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity 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 narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set 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 feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, 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 peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility