🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades 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 determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring 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 half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds 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 underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now 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 definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance