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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious Martian property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current MCU is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be set 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. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted 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 traditional human toil, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility