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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to close that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed 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 robot in her image, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is bridged with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance