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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed 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 flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility