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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 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 bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter'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 act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies 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 MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance