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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different directors, ranging from masters to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to teach us.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old 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 savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a long-term hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and also boosted the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic 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 obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's simple to picture a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the chance