🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions 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 portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's 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 underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that 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. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance