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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. 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 adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by 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 marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance