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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with every science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing dystopian, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored dehumanizing technology would actually function a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of these prophecies are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely take the primate species alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different film-makers, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by now in our planet's development. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and see if they have anything to teach us.

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 mankind discovers a gateway to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth can set up a research facility. Currently, the negative events – regarding narrative and concerning over-the-top film versions of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so even if we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a portal to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain extremely excited 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 credit for mankind's journey to the cosmos. This precedes we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Again, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's chintzy genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet doesn't tend to act as a beacon of optimism. If anyone wants to make that questionable Martian real estate sale, maybe they should start with first making the fantasy version appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have turned into a alarm clock constantly set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's annual increments. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be set in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so seem quite unmoored from our sense of time. But the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the convoluted and aimless TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that actually, this confusing mess unfolding before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the real world that assertion will probably turn out to be accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, initiating its chronology around 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of primates, it’s only 2026, with further human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this virus spreads around the world and set in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world global health crisis that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks less literal; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly impacted by the ongoing virus, hasn't been annihilated, and technological infrastructure definitely hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (to date!) nonetheless contains a significant bummer to offer, implying that human and/or ape nature, however one defines either, will inevitably lead to violent conflict, no matter the efforts of the best-intentioned individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, even if those instincts are not held by the most. Currently, it seems difficult to argue with that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily 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 skyscrapers as laborers toil underground on the equipment that power the city. Rich surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans builds a automaton in her likeness, hoping to bring the entire Metropolis down in flames. In this narrative, a robot created to imitate a human isn't a tool of the elite, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by reality in a future that in other ways appears to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on traditional human toil, which seems like a perfect fusion of conservative disdain for “unskilled workers” and business zeal for an tech boom. It has not yet materialized, but it's easy to picture a somewhat more utilitarian iteration of Lang’s city growing with the promise of a resurgence to manufacturing. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with concrete reforms. 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