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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for 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, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. 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 flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility