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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal 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 garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid 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 super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. 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 witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance