How Cinema Imagined and Misjudged the Year 2026

For decades, the year 2026 sat on the horizon as a convenient sandbox for science fiction. It was far enough away to justify flying cars and Martian colonies, yet close enough to feel tangible. Now that we have arrived, the cinematic “2026” offers a fascinating, and occasionally haunting, mirror to our actual lives.

Dwayne Johnson.

Perhaps the most famous depiction of our current year comes from Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece, Metropolis. Set exactly 100 years after its production, the film depicts a starkly divided society: billionaires in shimmering skyscrapers and laborers toiling in subterranean “caves of toil.” While we haven’t retreated underground, the film’s “Maschinenmensch” (the Robot Maria) feels strikingly relevant in the age of generative AI. Lang’s robot was built to disrupt social order—today, our “robots” are corporate-backed tools, but the anxiety regarding technology replacing the human soul remains identical.

Jessica Miglio.

While the original Apes films took place in the distant future, the modern trilogy positioned its pivotal collapse right now. In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, set in 2026, humanity has been decimated by the “Simian Flu”—a virus that spread globally in a montage that looks eerily like news footage from 2020. Six years post-COVID, we aren’t annihilated, but the film’s core thesis—that society is often at the mercy of those who appeal to our worst instincts—feels more like a documentary than a fantasy.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

Within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the timeline was pushed forward by the “five-year jump” in Avengers: Endgame. Consequently, much of the recent “Marvel dregs”—including the political paranoia of Secret Invasion and the quantum explorations of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania—officially take place in 2026. These films depict a world perpetually on the brink of cataclysm, exhausted by “wheel-spinning” crises that feel exhausting to the characters and the audience alike.

A still from Metropolis.

The video game adaptation Doom predicted that by 2026, we would discover a portal to Mars. While we haven’t found an ancient Martian city, the red planet remains a “stretch-goal hope” for the billionaire class. The film serves as a cautionary tale: before we try to sell the fantasy of Martian real estate, we might want to ensure the version of humanity we are sending there isn’t already mutated by its own greed.

As we navigate the actual 2026, it is clear that while we missed out on the portals to Mars, we are living squarely within the social and technological anxieties these filmmakers warned us about a century ago.