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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility