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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long 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 (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative 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 even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider 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 good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set 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 quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility