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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Maybe it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, a moment where we find ourselves, with each futuristic advancement – chiefly the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps more grim. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed anti-human technology would actually operate a bit better?) Didn't anyone sound the alarm regarding this?

The answer, particularly concerning our sci-fi movies from years ago (or occasionally months ago) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. Some of those warnings are broadly applicable (worldwide disaster) but in detail implausible (when mankind is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population with us). Some of them are prescient; the rest just resemble bad visual effects. Yet it remains worth examining where different directors, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be situated by this time in our planet's development. Therefore, we shall take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 throughout cinematic history and determine if they have anything to impart.

Doom

Well, this isn't promising. 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. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a portal to Mars now, we could gain some time to avert catastrophe. If we did discover a portal to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether a certain tech billionaire would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery was not a thing he personally paid for, allowing him to claim messianic ownership for humanity's journey into the stars. That's before we consider the collection of extraterrestrial genetics and subsequent transformations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) In general, *Doom* is (at the very least) a good test case for why, exactly we let Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Whether in the director's cheap-looking space-western *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the new-age mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our distant neighbor planet rarely act as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to make that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fictional depiction look good.

The Marvel Dregs

A of the strangest features of the present MCU is the way it handles the multiple global disasters, including a half-decade leap whose events are mostly not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly running a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a large assortment of Marvel stuff that various wikis clarify to be set in 2026. The good ones, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated adventure *The Marvels*, take place far away from Earth, and so feel pretty detached from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest Marvel has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the Zoom-call debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Based on these examples, we're in for a great deal of annoying stagnation in 2026, including the accompanying narrative that in truth, this nonsensical crap happening before our eyes is essential to future events. More troublingly, in the actual world that claim will probably turn out to be correct.

The Apes Saga Continues

The majority of the classic five-movie *Planet of the Apes* series is located in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that started with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* starts closer to home, initiating its timeline approximately 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s human population has done its damage, and simultaneously enhanced the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with additional human indignities (and victories for apes) to come. The end-credits sequence of *Rise*, illustrating how rapidly this virus spreads globally and set in 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the aftermath of the real-world pandemic that would dawn in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* seems less literal; astonishingly, we’re now six years out from the spread of Covid-19, and society, though obviously wounded by the ongoing virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the quartet of contemporary *Apes* movies (to date!) still has a substantial bummer in store, implying that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines each, will inevitably result in violent conflict, regardless of the work of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re at the mercy of those who exploit others’ baser impulses, although those instincts don't represent the most. Currently, it seems hard to argue with that, despite the fact that we ought to try.

The Silent Classic

Easily the best-known 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 wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as laborers work tirelessly below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Affluent city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the separate strata of Metropolis. A scientist with more radical plans creates a automaton in her likeness, hoping to tear the whole of Metropolis down in flames. 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 reality in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways appears to be progressing. *Metropolis* also envisions a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a perfect fusion of rightwing contempt for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It has not 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 haves and the poor is spanned with love; rather than with specific policies. Similar to *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates peaceful cohabitation; in contrast to *Dawn*, it appears hopeful about the possibility