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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely 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 different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – 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 even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *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 beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: 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 facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, 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 inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance