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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter'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 rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: 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 facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance