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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding 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 (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind'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, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch 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 underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest 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 in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance