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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed 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.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 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 bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. Should someone wishes to close that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel 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 in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung 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 timeline around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers 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 falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility