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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the real 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 located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility