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The year 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now 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 have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the negative events – in terms of narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain 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 assert messianic ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. 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 far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility