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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wants to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites 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 far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance