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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of 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 long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility