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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches 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 to ruin. 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 future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots 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 optimistic about the chance