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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether 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 far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series 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, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened 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 builds a automaton in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned 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