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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything 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 humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists 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 underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying 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 actual world that assertion will probably 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 began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers 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 massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance