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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films 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 underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual 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 set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance