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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: 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 in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility