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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see 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 recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Whether 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 rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance