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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper 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 made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, allowing him to claim messianic credit for humanity's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we even get to the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wants to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with first making the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a five-year time-jump whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the movies have turned into a clock radio constantly running a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place in 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing celebrating its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the machines that keep everything running. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot created to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component inverted by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The trickier, less plausible feat is the conclusion of the film, where the gap 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