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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 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 John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance