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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

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 humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an old 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 disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: 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 frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *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. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance