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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of 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 people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from 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 aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work 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. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance