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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything 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 virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction 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 make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio 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 these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

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* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 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 merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility