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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's 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'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of 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 quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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 nearer the present, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance