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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-film *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 nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility