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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff 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 distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, 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 automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance