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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient 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 discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version 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 chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility