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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic 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 wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached 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 remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original 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, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground 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 becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility