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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists 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 romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility