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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated 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 teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal 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 instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most 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 end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, 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 wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility