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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction 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 wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown 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. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility