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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least regarding science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by now in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (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 allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope 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 mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial downer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably 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, even if those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where rich businessmen preside over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance