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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (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 answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction 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 wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place 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 among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for 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, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance