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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway 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 narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily 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 futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility