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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to 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 people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi 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 hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless 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 frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect 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 love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility