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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates globally and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance