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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking 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 serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown 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*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located 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 around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance