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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (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 allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists 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 ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance