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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Well, 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 humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored 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 farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located 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, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance