🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, 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 hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *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 lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance