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The year 2025 could appear 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 possibly 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 warn us about this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content 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 far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility