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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal 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 immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking 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 make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst 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 great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance