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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a clock radio 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 adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance