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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting 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 appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility