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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, 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 stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with 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 adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle 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 related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow 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 approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance