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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent 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 good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running 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 better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility