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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting 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 the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic 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 beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running 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 better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative 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.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance