If Metropolis were made in 2026, its city of the future would stand in 2125.
The short answer
Metropolis was released in 1927 and set 99 years into its own future, in 2026. Made in 2026 instead, the same film would put its city in 2125.
The arithmetic
What year would Metropolis be set in if it were made in 2026?
When it was made
If it were made in 2026
Sources disagree: The film never names a year, and neither did Thea von Harbou: her preface to the 1925 novel places the story at no particular place or time, neither in the present nor in the future. The historians Lotte Eisner and Paul M. Jensen both dated the events to around 2000. The 2026 used here is the conventional dating rather than the film's own, and this page follows the convention because it is the one nearly every source now uses.
- Released
- 1927
- Originally set in
- 2026
- The gap
- 99 years
- Recalculated for 2026
- 2125
Verified, sourced
Metropolis, in 7 facts
The film never states a year. The 2026 everybody quotes arrived thirty-six years later, on a 1963 American paperback of Thea von Harbou's novel that was billed as "The World of 2026 A.D." and carried a foreword by Forrest J Ackerman. Later sources took the date from there. Source
Filming ran for seventeen months across 1925 and 1926 — 310 shooting days and 60 shooting nights — at a cost of more than five million Reichsmarks. Source
For the flooding of the workers' city, Brigitte Helm and 500 children from the poorest districts of Berlin worked for fourteen days in a pool that Lang deliberately kept at a low temperature. Source
H. G. Wells reviewed it in April 1927 and accused it of "foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general". Source
For the American release the playwright Channing Pollock was hired, at $1,000 a day, to rebuild the film out of its own footage. Sixteen reels became nine, and the running time fell from two and a half hours to one hour and forty-seven minutes. Source
In 2001, on a submission from Germany, the negative of the restored and reconstructed version was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register. Source
The complete film was thought lost for eighty years. In 2008 a rusted can in a Buenos Aires cinema museum turned out to hold a 16mm negative of the entire 150-minute cut. Source
The point
What the shift reveals
Every other page here starts from a year the work chose for itself. This one starts from a year a paperback chose. Lang’s city carries no date: no calendar, no title card, no line of dialogue. What it carries is distance — a world far enough ahead that its machinery could be invented rather than observed.
The dating that stuck put that distance at 99 years, near enough a century, and a century is not a prediction. It is a way of saying not us, but not strangers either. Run the same span forward and 2125 does identical work: far enough out that the towers can be anything at all, close enough in that somebody’s grandchildren are living in them.
What does change is the film’s standing. A story set 99 years out spends most of its life as a forecast, exactly one year as a present tense, and the rest of time as a period piece about a future that has been and gone. Which of those Metropolis is on any given morning, this page works out for itself.
Asked and answered
Questions people ask
- What year is Metropolis set in?
- 2026, by convention. The film itself never names a year — the date comes from a 1963 American paperback of the novel, and stuck.
- What year would Metropolis be set in if it were made today?
- 2125. The gap between the year it was made and the year it depicts is 99 years, and 99 years on from 2026 is 2125.
- How far into the future did Metropolis look?
- 99 years. It was released in 1927 and set in 2026, which is about as far ahead as a person can imagine and still furnish.
- Who made Metropolis, and when?
- Fritz Lang directed it and Thea von Harbou wrote both the novel it came from and the screenplay. It premiered in Berlin on 10 January 1927.