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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. However 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 great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original 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 chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance