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The date 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (if humanity is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's take a look at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated 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. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in John Carpenter's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wants to make that questionable red-planet property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the movies 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 large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But 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*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, starting its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and set around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology definitely has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will unavoidably lead to violent conflict, 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 drives are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

Easily the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but someone who wants to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the possibility