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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time 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 see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded 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 beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place 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 pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion propagates globally and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling 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 clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic 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 inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance