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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – chiefly the broad integration of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the primate species with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by now in the world's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Now, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning garish film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we might have a respite to avert catastrophe. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim messianic credit for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent transformations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking 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 wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has ever produced: 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 whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s merely 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans creates a robot in her image, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility