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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human 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 sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking 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 rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. 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 underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff 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*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance