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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely bring down the primate species alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's take a look 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 noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content 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*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest 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 these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting 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 enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and set in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance