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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant 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 pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance