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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow 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 around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. 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 advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance