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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

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 mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (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 become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing 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 somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility