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The date 2025 might sound more futuristic. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, at least concerning our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (if humanity is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a scientific outpost. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – does not actually transpire for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would remain extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he funded himself, allowing him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for the reasons we allow Mars serve as a long-term hope for humanity. Whether in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded 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 wants to close that dubious red-planet real estate sale, maybe they ought to begin with at least making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

One of the strangest features of the present MCU is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of MCU content that various wikis helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst Marvel has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the original 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 nearer the present, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and also boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a significant downer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it feels difficult to argue with that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. The director's silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to witness their downfall; it's one element inverted by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on traditional human toil, which appears as a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility