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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath 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 obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying 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’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance