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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic 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. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility