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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance