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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, 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 humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including 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 minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. However 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 farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *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 timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate 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 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 pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility