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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world'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 have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of 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 long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies 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 whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known 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 preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance