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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything 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 virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway 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 dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility