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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone 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 establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age 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 questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment 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 underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle 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 related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably 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 drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect 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 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 optimistic about the chance