The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?
The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.
Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.
A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis 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 feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.
The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.
By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility
