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The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. 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 – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish 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 another 20 years in the future, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original five-movie *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* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s merely 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, appears downright eerie in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems difficult to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a perfect union of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a slightly less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the chance