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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the movies that have been depicted in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set 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 seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: 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 facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance