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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 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 – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set 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 quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. 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 one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility