🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists 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 underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter 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. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much 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 chance