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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now 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 see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps 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 creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return 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 concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility