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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk 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, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU 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. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped 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 relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion 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