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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel 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 whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear 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 an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance