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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio perpetually set 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 taking place 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 pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility