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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm 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. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted 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 swiftly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility