The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?
The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.
Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.
A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering 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 frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.
The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.
Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent 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 reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance
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