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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe 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 futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow 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 new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance