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The year 2025 might sound more futuristic. Maybe it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly more grim. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The response, at least concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just resemble poor visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, thought we'd be positioned by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine at some of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

Doom

Well, 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 ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so even if we find a portal to Mars now, we could gain a respite to avoid catastrophe. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, 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 allow Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking space-western *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 optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the goofiest quirks of the current MCU is the way it handles the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – only instead of 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 good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates around the world and set in 2019, appears downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already six years out from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the most. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

Metropolis

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the skyscrapers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who preaches a coming together of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the whole of Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine created to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but an entity who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that otherwise appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility