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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect 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 poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility