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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly 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 better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility