🔗 Share this article

The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be 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. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority 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* starts closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. 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 difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility