🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists 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 distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, 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 clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility