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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with every science-fiction-style advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology would actually operate more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm about this?

The answer, at least regarding our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail far-fetched (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are prescient; others just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains valuable to explore where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now in the world'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 impart.

Doom

Well, this doesn't bode well. In the universe of the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity finds a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a scientific outpost. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades later, so should we find a portal to Mars now, we might have some time to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a passageway to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's expansion into the stars. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that dubious Martian property deal, maybe they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the films have become like a clock radio perpetually running a few seconds fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, along with the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, initiating its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates the majority of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie in the wake of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; astonishingly, we’re now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, hasn't been wiped out, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts don't represent the most. Right now, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her image, aiming to tear the entire Metropolis down in flames. Here, a robot designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a future that otherwise appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which seems like a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; unlike *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility