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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire 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, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio 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 stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter 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 seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion 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 scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility