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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. 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 ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached 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 Zoom-call farce 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 in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow 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 virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, 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, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment 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 becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility