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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations 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 the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering 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 wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably 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 majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created 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 the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility