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The date 2025 could appear increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 signifies one step beyond, a moment where we find ourselves, with every futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally recently) positioned in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. But it's valuable to explore where various film-makers, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. So let's examine a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and determine if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this isn't promising. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose 20th anniversary was recently celebrated by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we find a portal to Mars this year, we might have some time to avert true disaster. If we did discover a portal to an ancient Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the portal was not a thing he funded himself, enabling him to assert savior-like credit for humanity's expansion to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is closer to 2046, distinct from the Wong Kar-wai film.) In general, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we allow Mars become a long-term hope for humanity. Be it in the director's chintzy space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely serve as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to close that questionable red-planet real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fictional depiction 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 disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the movies have become like a clock radio constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty unmoored from our sense of time. But the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this nonsensical crap happening in front of us is essential to future events. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

The Apes Saga Continues

Most of the classic five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located 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 chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s merely 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how swiftly this contagion spreads globally and set around 2019, looks downright eerie in the aftermath of the actual global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; if you can believe it, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not annihilated, and our technology definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this most pessimistic of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer in store, implying that human and/or ape nature, whatever qualifies as each, will inevitably lead to warfare, no matter the work of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the majority. Right now, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known portrayal of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its 100th anniversary. Fritz Lang’s iconic silent film *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists lord over the towers as laborers toil below the surface on the machines that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive class divisions when he falls for Maria, an underground organizer who preaches a coming together of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans creates a robot in her likeness, 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 ruling corporate class, but someone who wants to see them destroyed; it's a component flipped by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and business zeal for an AI bubble. It has not yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a somewhat less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city growing with the prospect of a return to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the have-nots is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears optimistic about the possibility