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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "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 – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function more effectively?) Did no one warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in the world's development. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that mankind finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – regarding plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually go down for two more decades later, so should we find a Martian gateway this year, we could gain some time to avoid catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, 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 hope for mankind. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a substantial downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, 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 drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as workers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology depends on traditional manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to picture a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility