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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set 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 primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, 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 finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, 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. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim 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 more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance