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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown 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 MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete 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 debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance