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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; 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 appears optimistic about the chance