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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic development – chiefly the widespread adoption of AI – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of those warnings are universally relevant (worldwide disaster) but specifically implausible (when mankind is inevitably ravaged, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just look like poor visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in the world's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to teach us.

The Game '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 mankind finds a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth can set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars this year, we might have a respite to avoid true disaster. If we did uncover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like credit for mankind's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a long-term aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. Should someone wishes to make that dubious red-planet property deal, perhaps they should start with at least ensuring the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various global cataclysms, including a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underrated adventure *The Marvels*, take place distant from Earth, and so seem pretty unmoored from any concrete sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has created: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to future events. Even worse, in the real world that claim will likely turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is located in the more distant future of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a virus that knocks out most of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling 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 already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and society, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and technological infrastructure certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial downer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

By far the best-known depiction of 2026 in film is from a movie nearing celebrating its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a futuristic city where rich businessmen lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, scion of the city’s ruler, has his eyes opened to these enormous class divisions when he falls for Maria, an subterranean activist who preaches a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to tear the whole of Metropolis to ruin. Here, a robot designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the elite, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of conservative contempt for “the working class” and business enthusiasm for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly more utilitarian version of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a return to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; not so much 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 chance