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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration 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 woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. 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 distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance