🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow 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 sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel 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 great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim 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 around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already 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 hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out 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 spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility