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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel 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 these examples, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, 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 appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility