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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least 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 in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain 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 messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive 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 more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility