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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake 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 half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility