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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, 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 mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – 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 even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations 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 why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring 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 global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility