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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance