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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction 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 optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set 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 seem quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility