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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility