🔗 Share this article

The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, 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 humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's 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 distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further 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, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. 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 underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance