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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance