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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to 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 ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest 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 this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen 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 human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich 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 preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance