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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff 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 distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: 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 in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility