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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding 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 far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion 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 coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility