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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

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 discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations 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 the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set 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 quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest 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 whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility