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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle 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* starts closer to home, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced 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 set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created 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 one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance