The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?
The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine 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 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst 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 facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began 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 people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed 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 darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility
