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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. But it's worth examining where different directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director'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 act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete 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 Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility