🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter 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 could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines 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 organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance