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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly 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-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance