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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most 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, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created 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 vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility