🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see 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 recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch 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 underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich 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 advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” 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 version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. 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 concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance