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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: 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 great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *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 closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident 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 coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance