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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. 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 gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – 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 two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify 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 feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, 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 set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis 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 society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility