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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal 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 spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set 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 pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio 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 wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant 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 timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance