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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, 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 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades later, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy 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 doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil underground on the machines that power the city. Affluent 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 subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the chance