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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) 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 most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst 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 facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; 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 optimistic about the possibility