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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set 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 ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding 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 Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites 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 distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But 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*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance