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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside 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 journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, 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 allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set 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 feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless 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, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow 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 most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility