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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 one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. 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 ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, 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 the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction 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 optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface 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 subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility