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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

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 mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter'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 beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, 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 any concrete sense of time. But 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*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding 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

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility