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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal 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 instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (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 why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with 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 quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility