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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned 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 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing 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 monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy 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 intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably 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 don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance