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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 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 research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction 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 preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance