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The date 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the sound of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents one step beyond, and it's where we currently stand, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or possibly even worse. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-backed anti-human technology might operate more effectively?) Did no one sound the alarm about this?

The response, particularly concerning science fiction films from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is both yes and no. Some of those warnings are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by now 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 contain any lessons to impart.

Doom

Now, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that mankind discovers a portal to an ancient city on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to establish a research facility. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning garish cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – doesn't really go down for two more decades in the future, so should we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to tell whether a certain tech billionaire would still be super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would instantly become disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to claim savior-like ownership for mankind's journey to the cosmos. That's before we even get to the harvesting of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, 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 hope for mankind. Whether 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 far-off planet rarely serve as a symbol of optimism. If anyone wishes to make that dubious red-planet real estate sale, perhaps they should start with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

One of the goofiest quirks of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the various world-threatening cataclysms, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose occurrences are largely undepicted in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few minutes fast – only instead of minutes, it's annual increments. So there's a whole bunch 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 underrated romp *The Marvels*, occur far away from Earth, and so feel quite unmoored from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is among the weakest Marvel has created: the nonsensically meandering 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 great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, along with the accompanying spin that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. More troublingly, in the real world that claim will likely 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 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, starting its chronology around 2016. So by the time a pathogen that devastates the majority of Earth’s people has run its course, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) to come. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus spreads globally and taking place around 2019, looks downright eerie 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 now half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, hasn't been annihilated, and our technology certainly hasn't been knocked out. But this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a significant bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, whatever qualifies as either, will inevitably result in 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 are not held by the most. Currently, it feels hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

Metropolis

By far the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie nearing marking its centennial. The director's iconic silent film *Metropolis* takes place in a city of tomorrow where rich businessmen preside over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his eyes opened to these massive class divisions when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to mimic a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but someone who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where technology relies on old-fashioned human toil, which seems like a most logical union of conservative contempt for “unskilled workers” and business enthusiasm for an AI bubble. It has not yet materialized, but it's simple to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a resurgence to industrial production. The more complex, harder-to-imagine feat is the ending of the film, where the chasm between the haves and the poor is bridged with compassion; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie pleads for coexistence; unlike *Dawn*, it seems hopeful about the chance