The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?
The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted 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 video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. 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 mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.
Marvel's Lesser Offerings
A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by 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 happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.
The Apes Saga Continues
Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.
The Silent Classic
By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component 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 traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance
