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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: 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 frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility