🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter'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 far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff 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*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility