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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection 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 doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely 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 years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance