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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative 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 should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avert true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation 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. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance