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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble poor green screen. But it's valuable to explore where various directors, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the negative events – in terms of plot and in terms of garish film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to uncover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting 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 (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

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* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a automaton in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; 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 chance