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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell 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 messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored 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 these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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 closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility