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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics 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 stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks 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 mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But 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 in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending 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 pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility