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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify 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 quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series 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* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility