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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, 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 discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy 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 rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty 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 remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident 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 preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance