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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. 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 act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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 nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also 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 propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance