2025 sounds more futuristic. Maybe it’s the “f” sound on “five.” But 2026 is one step beyond, and it’s where we are now, with every science-fiction-style development – principally the widespread adoption of AI – looking dystopian, or maybe worse. (Doesn’t it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually work a bit better?) Didn’t anyone warn us about this?
The answer, at least with regards to our sci-fi movies years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it’s worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we’d be situated by this time in our planet’s evolution. So let’s take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.
Doom
Well, this doesn’t bode well. According to the video game adaptation Doom, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn’t really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it’s genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn’t something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind’s expansion into the stars. That’s before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, Doom is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly, we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter’s chintzy space-western Ghosts of Mars, the more grounded sci-fi of Red Planet, or the woo-woo mysticism of Mission to Mars, our distant neighbor planet doesn’t tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.
The Marvel Dregs
One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves, the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it’s years. So there’s a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 and the underrated romp The Marvels, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show Secret Invasion and the Zoom-call farce of Ant Man and the Wap: Quantumania. Judging by this stuff, we’re in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Most of the original five-movie Planet of the Apes cycle is set in the further-flung future 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 around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of Rise, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie Dawn looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn’t been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn’t been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary Apes movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don’t represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.
Metropolis
By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of the Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn’t a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it’s one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. Metropolis also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn’t yet come to pass, but it’s easy to picture some somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike Dawn, it seems optimistic about the possibility that such coexistence could be possible. Given how the billionaire class (or even the less rarified millionaire class) reacts to any suggestion that they should step closer to the needs of the less fortunate, the idea that facing any degree of extremism might chasten them seems fantastical now – more so than it did a century ago. The robot, the caves of toil, the shimmering skyscrapers … that all seems plausible enough. For rebalancing economic gaps to seem likely, we might have to wait another year. Or hundred.