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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought 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 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located 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 around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities 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 virus propagates globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative 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 iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence 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 advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance