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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. But it's worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone 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 can establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction 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 questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place 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 feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility