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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 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 bad stuff – in terms of plot 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 find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify 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 feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But 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 this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung 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 approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, 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 drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, 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 advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility