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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the broad integration of AI – seeming dystopian, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a true dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might function a bit better?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly regarding our sci-fi movies made long ago (or sometimes months ago) positioned in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species with us). Others of them are prescient; others just look like poor visual effects. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's evolution. Therefore, we shall examine a selection of the movies that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth can establish a research facility. Now, the negative events – regarding plot and in terms of garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really transpire for two more decades in the future, so should we do discover a Martian gateway this year, we could gain a respite to avoid true disaster. Were we to discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be extremely excited to send everyone to Mars or would instantly become dejected that the portal was not a thing he personally paid for, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the collection of Martian chromosomes and resulting mutations into horrific creatures. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Whether in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with at least making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a half-decade leap whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites clarify to be set 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 quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is some of the worst Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and also enhanced the cognitive abilities of primates, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and victories for apes) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this contagion propagates globally and taking place around 2019, appears profoundly unsettling 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 now half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously impacted by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure certainly has not been knocked out. But this bleakest of the quartet of modern *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as either, will unavoidably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Right now, it seems difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen lord over the skyscrapers as workers work tirelessly underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, scion of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these enormous class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A scientist with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a robot created to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's a component inverted by the modern world in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where technology depends on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and corporate enthusiasm for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking version of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. 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. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility