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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one 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 those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, 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 humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real 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* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; 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 advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm 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 advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance