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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *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 can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. 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 acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place 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 feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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 nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts 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 most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor 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