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The year 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 currently stand, with each futuristic development – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, at least concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble bad green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, thought we'd be situated by now in the world's development. So let's examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Now, this isn't promising. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and in terms of garish film versions of a FPS video game – does not actually go down for another 20 years in the future, so should we find a portal to Mars this year, we could gain some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a symbol of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with at least ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the films themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite detached from our sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless 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, including the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that assertion will likely turn out to be correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and also boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) still has a significant bummer in store, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably lead to warfare, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it feels hard to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known portrayal of 2026 in film is from a movie close to celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a most logical fusion of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility