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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 signifies a leap forward, a moment where we currently stand, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of artificial intelligence – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately ravaged, we will most likely take the ape population alongside us). Others of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. 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

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the video game adaptation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 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 negative events – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down 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 truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to assert messianic credit for mankind's expansion into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a long-term aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded science fiction of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to close that questionable Martian property deal, maybe they should start with first ensuring the fictional depiction look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of MCU content that fan sites clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is some of the worst 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 facing a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this nonsensical crap unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the original five-movie *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts nearer the present, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out the majority of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would begin in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not annihilated, and our technology certainly has not been knocked out. But this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, even though we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, hoping to bring the whole of Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot designed to imitate a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that otherwise seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional manual labor, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the conclusion of the film, where the chasm between the wealthy and the poor is spanned with compassion; not so much with concrete reforms. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance