🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal 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 dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term 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 new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't 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 manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance