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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically 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. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now 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 see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff 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 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 claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility