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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps 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 development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential 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

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung 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 timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility