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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot 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 do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking 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 wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility