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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility