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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow 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 around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires 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 imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; 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