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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting 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 good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with 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 better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened 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 more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility