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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, 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. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located 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, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot 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 flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance