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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they contain any lessons to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, 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 finds a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a passageway to an old 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 was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wishes to make that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple global cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place 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 seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears downright eerie 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 onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been knocked out. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the most. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing 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 work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; not so much with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility