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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avert catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will probably prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus propagates globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, 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 imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility