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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify 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 quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most 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) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned 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 hopeful about the chance