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The year 2025 might sound increasingly advanced. Perhaps it's the presence of the letter "f" in "five". However 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we find ourselves, with each science-fiction-style development – chiefly the broad integration of artificial intelligence – appearing bleak, or perhaps even worse. (Doesn't it feel like in a true dystopia, the brain-numbing corporate-backed dehumanizing technology would actually function more effectively?) Didn't anyone warn us about this?

The answer, particularly concerning science fiction films made long ago (or occasionally recently) set in 2026, is a mixed bag. A number of these prophecies are universally relevant (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is ultimately decimated, we will most likely bring down the ape population alongside us). Some of them are prescient; others just resemble poor green screen. Yet it remains worth examining where various directors, from geniuses to grunts, believed we'd be situated by now in the world's evolution. So let's examine at some of the movies 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 virtually no one, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a portal to an long-lost metropolis on Mars, where the people of Earth are able to set up a scientific outpost. Currently, the bad stuff – in terms of narrative and in terms of over-the-top cinematic imitations of a first-person-shooter video game – doesn't really transpire for another 20 years in the future, so even if we find a Martian gateway now, we might have a respite to avoid catastrophe. Were we to discover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's genuinely difficult to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to dispatch people to Mars or would immediately turn dejected that the discovery wasn't something he funded himself, enabling him to assert messianic credit for mankind's journey into the stars. This precedes we consider the collection of Martian chromosomes and subsequent mutations into horrific creatures. (Once more, this is closer to 2046, not to be confused with the Wong Kar-wai film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for the reasons we allow Mars become a stretch-goal hope for mankind. Be it in the director's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the realistic sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo mysticism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet rarely act as a beacon of hope. Should someone wishes to make that dubious Martian real estate sale, perhaps they ought to begin with first ensuring the fictional depiction appear appealing.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the strangest features of the current Marvel Cinematic Universe is the way it handles the various global disasters, encompassing a half-decade leap whose events are largely not shown in the movies themselves; the films have become like a alarm clock constantly set a few seconds fast – only instead of minutes, it's years. Consequently, there exists a whole bunch of Marvel stuff that fan sites helpfully explain to be taking place 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 pretty unmoored from our sense of time. However the bad stuff is among the weakest the studio has ever produced: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting farce of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by these examples, we're facing a great deal of frustrating stagnation in 2026, including the related narrative that actually, this confusing mess happening before our eyes is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that claim will probably prove accurate.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Most of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* series is set in the further-flung future of Earth, but the new trilogy that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins closer to home, starting its timeline around 2016. So by the time a virus that devastates most of Earth’s people has done its damage, and simultaneously boosted the intelligence of apes, it’s only 2026, with further setbacks for mankind (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how swiftly this contagion propagates around the world and set around 2019, looks profoundly unsettling in the wake of the real-world pandemic that would begin in 2020. By comparison, the movie *Dawn* looks more abstract; astonishingly, we’re already half a decade from the spread of Covid-19, and humanity, though clearly wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and technological infrastructure definitely has not been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four modern *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer in store, suggesting that human and/or ape nature, however one defines each, will unavoidably result in violent conflict, regardless of the efforts of the most well-meaning among us. We’re subject to the whims of those who exploit others’ worst instincts, even if those drives don't represent the majority. Currently, it feels difficult to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

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* is set in a futuristic city where wealthy industrialists lord over the skyscrapers as workers toil below the surface on the equipment that power the city. Rich city-dweller Freder, son of the city’s master, has his perspective changed to these massive social gaps when he becomes obsessed with Maria, an subterranean organizer who preaches a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with more radical plans builds a robot in her likeness, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. Here, a machine designed to imitate a human does not serve as an instrument of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who wants to witness their downfall; it's a component flipped by the modern world in a vision of tomorrow that in other ways seems to be progressing. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery relies on old-fashioned manual labor, which appears as a most logical union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an AI bubble. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's simple to imagine a somewhat more utilitarian version of Lang’s city expanding out with the prospect of a resurgence to manufacturing. The trickier, harder-to-imagine accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the wealthy and the have-nots is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility