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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place 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 seem quite unmoored 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 Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility