🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, 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 discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot 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 even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: 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 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 essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility