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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our 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*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, 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-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance