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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's 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 underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance