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 would 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.
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, such as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 and the underrated romp The Marvels, take place far away from Earth, so they 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 Wasp: 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.