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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper 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 science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time 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 see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content 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 far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, 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-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of 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 witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility