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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment 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*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung 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 around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap 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 coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance