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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be taking place 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 quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance