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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, 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 humanity discovers a portal 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 over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting 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 actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original 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 approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to argue with 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 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. 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 underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise 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 poor is spanned 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 optimistic about the possibility