🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. 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 finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction 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 hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks 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 now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance