🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known 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 rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich 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 activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility